Raining Life

Tonight we have a meteor shower, the debris from a comet falling to Earth.

There may be profound significance to this sort of event.

First of all, it's highly probable. For gravitational reasons, all of the Sun's orbiters, over time, have come to lie essentially in a single plane. Given the long orbit of the comet, and the nearly circular one of Earth, it's inevitable that our paths will cross. And the radiant heat of the Sun guarantees that the ice ball leaves its outer skin behind each pass through. What's more intriguing is what it has been doing while on the far reach of its orbit.

It's been a cold object sweeping through a hot gas cloud, with such basic components of life as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. This cloud is not very thick, which is why the comet doesn't melt and meet obliteration there. But it does sweep through,
quenching the variety of chemical reactions that transiently occur in very hot environs.

Life didn't necessarily start here. The basic blocks, the amino acids, may first have
rained down in just such comet debris, distant ancient cousins to the light show tonight.

beer at the white house

OK, this one is out of the news now, but some things still need saying.

The uproar has subsided, with a talking head consensus that "this isn't about cops
trampling on the rights of black citizens, it's just about cops trampling on the rights of all citizens", as if that makes the problem go away.

Black people certainly do experience more than their share of such incidents, which may lead them to conclude, falsely, that only members of minorities are so imposed on.

A couple of stories you haven't heard on the national news:

In Easton, PA, a man heard about an altercation between his son and a classmate at school. He responded to this by getting his gun, taking his son to meet the classmate,
and then threatening the boy to prevent him from leaving or defending himself while his son beat the kid up. The prosecutor investigated the case, and could find nothing to prosecute! Irrelevant detail: the man was a cop. Irrelevant detail: everybody involved was white.

In the jurisdiction of this same prosecutor, Bethlehem, there was another notable case of unwarranted police violence. The details are sketchy, but if you've got nexus access, you can find a column that Paul Carpenter of the Morning Call wrote
about it.

Here's the sordid fact that the press hasn't told you - prosecutors do not rein in
cops. Why? because they are elected officials. They get elected by winning cases.
They have to have police cooperation to do that. They don't last if they piss off the
police. Which means that cops are free to also be crooks. For the benefit of idiots,
I hasten to say that I am not suggesting that all cops are crooks. What I am saying
is that their system does not meaningfully encourage them not to be. And that's a
problem. If people always did "the right thing" without consequences for doing "the
wrong thing", there would be no point in having cops in the first place. To suggest
that it's a tolerable thing to have a system where cops are not meaningfully
accountable is to argue for the abolition of their jobs.

So it is that we have a cop who falsely arrested a citizen for the non-crime of
speaking his mind, on his own property, even. Rather than serving hard time for his
crime against the First Amendment, not to mention assault with a deadly weapon, he's
drinking beer on the White House lawn.

In a free country, we would have a system where those who break the highest law, the
constitution, would be called to account for those crimes as surely as those who
break the more mundane laws. Don't hold your breath.

The wise Latina woman

Tomorrow this story will be put to bed, perhaps, though not likely, forever.

Curiously, nobody has really parsed the words of the now-famous phrase: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

If we change two words in that statement, it reads "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would as often as not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

That statement could not be construed as racist, and in fact objection to it would, on
its face, be racist.

So really, the furor revolves around the distinction between "more often than not" as
opposed to "as often as not". But "as often as not" is, mathematically, highly unlikely. If you toss a coin two million times, it is not going to come up heads exactly one million times. So the "as often as not" phrase would be unobjectionable,
but also false on its face, while the actual statement, which may or may not be true,
but at least could conceivably be true, raises holy hell.

Here's why it probably is true, at least in Sotomayor's case: the typical white male that goes to Princeton and Yale has only lived life in one station. The same cannot be said for Sotomayor. And that's the real reason for the furor. Rich, powerful people only want the outlook of rich, powerful people represented in government, for obvious reasons. They don't need to worry. You can't get justice if you can't pay through the nose for elite lawyers, no matter who is on the bench.

Degrees of Separation

I left high school in 1975. Something funny happened to me that last year, that I was reminded of
again this past week.

I was just 15 that year, but nearly all the classes I was taking were advanced placement, with
mostly seniors and some juniors. One of the senior girls accosted me one day, indignant over
something I had done. She wouldn't tell me what it was. You know that when you've done something
to piss off a female, you're expected to know what you did. She gave me a slight break, however,
in letting me know when I had done it. It was in a dream she had the night before.

I thought that was kind of funny, so I've told that story some number of times over the years. For
all I know, so has she, although I doubt she found it humorous, and I also doubt she got much of the
sympathy she would have been seeking if she had.

At any rate, I was reminded again of it watching "Flight of the Conchords", an HBO series built
around the comic music of, well, the Conchords. The sole fan of the band was mad at one of the duo
for something he had done to her in a dream, and was demanding an apology.

In all the years I've told that story, nobody yet has said "Yeah, that happened to me one time,
too". It seems likely to me that it has taken 34 years for that story to wend its way to the ear
of a cript writer.

How Probable is Life?

A curious phenomenon you may have encountered before is called the birthday paradox. If there's just
one person in a room, then the probability is one that that person, being the only person in the
room, doesn't share a birthday with anyone else in the room. On the other hand, if there are 367
people in the room, then since there are only 366 possible birthdays, two must share a birthday.

So now the question is this: If we keep adding people to the room, starting with one, then two, and
so on, at what point is there a 50-50 chance that there are two people in the room that have the
same birthday? The answer is surprisingly small: 22. (At 21, the odds are nearly 50-50, at 22, the
odds are slightly better.)

But at a party with 22 people, when, as happens half the time, two people discover that they've got
the same birthday, they'll probably be amazed, perhaps exclaiming "What are the chances of that?"

Life is discussed in the same terms. Life is a wonderful thing, which may lead us to believe that
it's a rare occurrence. But is it?

To begin to examine the question, we need to understand the Principle of Selection, as we've
discussed before. If something is more probable, it probably happens more. Everything we know
about chemistry boils down to physics, and everything we know about physics boils down to methods
for calculating probabilities of things.

So what is most probable? On our planet Earth, we have a constant stream of energy arriving from
the Sun. When any two chemicals collide, there's an electomagnetic interaction that occurs, and
the outcome of that depends on things like what their precise orientation was when they collided,
how energetically they collided, what the possible result states are, and what their energies are.
Some reactions absorb energy, others release energy. The flow of energy from the Sun tends to
favor reactions that absorb energy. And here's the thing - all reactions are in competition with
all other reactions. If a given reaction absorbs some energy, that energy is no longer available
to power some other, competing reaction. In the long run, when we're all dead, the most probable
state tends to be the one of lowest free energy, due to the constant pressure situation we find
ourselves in due to the atmosphere weighing down on us. But in the shorter term, during which
life is happening, it's the _fast_ reactions that win. If a reaction is fast, it soaks up the
free energy, starving out competing reactions.

What reactions are fast? The ones that are catalyzed. What catalyzes a reaction, is some geometric
arrangement that lowers what's called the activation energy. The probability of a reaction dies
incredibly fast as the activation energy rises.

The trouble, of course, is that the catalyst has to be in the right place at the right time. But
there's one foolproof way for a chemical reaction to guarantee that the catalyst is always present
- the reaction can be self-catalyzing. A self-catalyzing reaction, if it exists at all, will
outrun anything. And that's damn close to a definition of life. RNA catalyzes the construction of
matching RNA. RNA, in turn, catalyzes the construction of matching proteins, which in turn are the
catalysts that run all the processes of life. This process of soaking up energy we call "growth",
and we keep growing until we get as big as we feasibly can. At just the point we slow down
growing, we resume that growth by reproducing, delegating to offspring the work of continuing to
soak up energy.

A relatively small piece of RNA is self catalyzing, in the presence of amino acids. However long
it might take for such a piece to synthesize in the first place, once it did, it would grow
rapidly, and take over, as indeed it has, particularly in the diffusive medium provided by oceans.

Where do the amino acids come from? There's an interesting possibility there, too. The answer may
turn out to be comets. With their irregular orbits, they sweep the far reaches of the solar system
and being ice balls, as they near the sun they shed themselves in the path of Earth's orbit. Also
being ice balls, they tend to quench the reactions they collide with. So if a molecule is in a
high energy state, before it can decompose it can be hit by an iceball, which freezes it in.

In the outer reaches of the solar system, where these comets sweep, it appears that there is
a high temperature gas, of just the sorts of things amino acids are made from. And at high
temperatures, all reactions are possible, all occur, if only for a moment. If they're frozen in,
then that moment can last a long time. Long enough for the piggyback ride to the sun, and the dive
into the ocean. Given the vast ranges these comets sweep, this mechanism for quenching and
ferrying interesting chemical formations, and depositing them onto planets, makes that bottom
rung beginning step of life far more probable than it might, at first blush, seem to be.

Are Mormons Christian?

The topic is a bit of a digression, and it's not the hot topic now that it was when Mitt Romney was
running for president. Of course republicans are hierarchical creatures, so there's a significant
chance that he'll be back, what with McCain being four years older. At any rate, I've been promising
this to a friend for some time.

It's a question that I'm rather uniquely qualified to answer. When I took religion seriously, I was
a Mormon bishop, so I have a pretty clear sense of how the world looks from that viewpoint. Now that
I no longer do, I have no particular axes to grind, so I'm not bound to apologize for that view.

To ask if Mormons are Christian is a lot like asking if Fraptillians are Scushnarians. Until it's
clear what each word means, it's not terribly meaningful to ask how they relate. Each word is
surprisingly hard to nail down, and for the same reason, which we'll get to.

The most general useful definition of Mormon is probably "somebody who takes the Book of Mormon
seriously as a religious text", that book being an 1830 publication of Joseph Smith, which narrates migrations from the Middle East to the Americas of two families, one at the time of the
biblical tower of Babel story, the other from Jerusalem in the times of Jeremiah, author of a book
in the collection of Jewish religious writings.

In parallel, the most general useful definition of Christian is probably "somebody who takes Jesus
of Nazareth seriously as fulfilling the predictions of an 'anointed one' in the Jewish religious
tradition". Not that there's any doubt that Jesus was anointed - at least according to all the
people who wrote "according to" books. But a specific anointed one was predicted to be the
deliverer of the Jewish people. The defining schism between Jews and Christians is, first of all,
whether "spiritual deliverance" counts as "deliverance", and whether Jesus did actually provide
the former. The disappointment that gave rise to the distinction, the death of Jesus, spawned the
high level of Christian missionary effort that gave the modern world of tens of millions of
self-described Jews, and hundreds of millions of self-described Christians.

By this definition, Mormons are Christian, but significant numbers of Christians would find that
definition unacceptable. For Christians seeking to exclude Mormons, the commonly heard definition
is "someone who takes the Bible to be the literal complete word of God". That's a fascinating
definition, stunning in its naivete, even if you take seriously the idea of gods in the first
place. The first problem is to say what you actually mean by "the Bible". The word itself is no
help, biblia just means "books", begging the question "which books?". The collection of books
accepted by Jews is different from the collection accepted by Catholics, which in turn is
different from the collection accepted by, say, the king James translators. A more embarrassing
indictment of the concept is found in one of the books that all of them accept, that of Jeremiah,
who attacks the claims of the Jewish people of his day to special holiness by virtue of possessing
their version of the Bible, with the assertion that "the lying pen of scribes has made it a lie".
You won't find that in chapter 8, verse 8, of James' translation, because, well, the lying pen of
translators made it a lie..., but oddly enough the Jewish scribes saw no need to alter the Hebrew
manuscripts, which have survived. So, if you can believe the Bible, you can't really believe the
Bible!

(Perhaps the best way to slip that noose is to fall back on the line used by the Texas
superintendent of schools to kill the teaching of foreign languages - "if English was good enough
for Jesus, it's good enough for our kids". )

The word they really want you to notice in that definition, however, is "complete"; their
rejection of Mormons is the argument that the Book of Mormon purports to "add to" the "word of
God", and point to a proof-text in "John's unveiling", invoking curses on anyone who "adds to"
"this book". The Mormon response to that is two-fold. The first embarrassing fact is that the
same incantation is found in what Christians call "the old testament", and what Jews call "the
bible". The same logic would invalidate "the new testament". The second embarrassing fact is that
John's revelation is not the last book of the Christian bible. Quite a few of the other books
in "the new testament" were actually written later. They are not, traditionally, printed in
chronological order. So the same logic invalidates significant portions of well-accepted Christian
writings, and perhaps even "according to John".

Another amusing difficulty with this definition of Christian, is that it excludes as Christian
both Martin Luther and John Calvin, as "Martin Luther found it an offensive piece of work" and "John Calvin had grave doubts about its value."[32] in reference to ... John's unveiling.

The other line of attack on Mormons is the "cult" charge. Cult is just an old French word meaning
religion, but they mean by that something sinister and eerie. And there are sinister, eerie
aspects to Mormon history, which are strictly bush-league on the scale of, say, the Catholic
inquisition. In some ways, the comparison of Mormons to Catholics is most apt. Both are rigidly
hierarchical, with significant adulation focused on a single leader, Both claim an exclusive right
to control the "priesthood", an obviously related phenomenon. Both have a history of abusing that
claim for sexual predation, also an obviously related phenomenon. Both have buried all the (potentially embarrassing) historical documents they have been able to get their hands on into
secret archives. Both wear peculiar clothes as a form of priestly display. Both hide their gayness
behind virulent anti-gay rhetoric. Both have built significant financial empires. To be fair, both
have devoted significant resources to the needs of the poor.

Today, I suspect, only the most lunatic fringe of self-described Christians would call the
Catholic church a cult. We can safely say, then, that a religion is a cult which has grown rich
enough to hire a publicist. By that standard neither the Catholic church nor the Mormon one can
be called a cult.

Of course what is meant by "the Mormon church" requires some qualification. The organization that
Joseph Smith assembled fractured on his death. The two largest fractions coalesced around (one of)
Smith's widow(s), Emma, and Brigham Young. The former stayed in the midwest, the latter migrated
to Utah, spreading into Canada and Mexico, and west to the coast. Each denies the legitimacy of
the other, quite bitterly up until very recently. Part of the bitterness is that typical of all
family businesses. Somebody always ends up getting screwed. The Missouri church ended up being the
property of Joseph's family, while the Utah church ended up being the property of his brother
Hiram's family. (Even most devout Mormons of the Utah church on't realize the extent to which
their religion is a family business. At one point in the 80's nearly all of the 15 men who make
up the controlling leadership of the organization had in common a single first/second cousin.)

Of course Mormons will claim that the leadership is not paid, which is no longer true. The low
level leadership is still volunteer, But even in the low levels, the pay is significant in the
only coin that biologically matters - eggs. No, not chicken eggs. You may have seen the pictures
circulating, showing an implausibly ugly man in close company with an incredibly attractive woman,
with the caption "how to spot a millionaire". In Utah, the caption would read "how to spot the
son of a Mormon church leader." The sexual reward system was rather more formal and outlandish in
the last two centuries. Brigham Young had 50+ women. And there are Mormon groups that to this day
reward themselves and their supporters with the sexual favors of multiple underage women.

Which introduces the next complication in the meaning of the word Mormon. When Brigham Young
arrived in Utah, he proceeded to assemble a western empire. He nearly succeeded, and was only
thwarted by the California gold rush, and then the transcontinental railway, which brought a
massive migration to the West of people he couldn't control. To this day, his successors
completely control the state of Utah, with significant influence in Idaho, Arizona, and even the
coastal states. The senior senator from Nevada, of all places, is Mormon, and the
anti-gay-marriage effort in California was truly touching to see - Mormons, who have a deeply
racist history, and a history of denied civil rights, united with Blacks, to deny civil
rights to gay people.

The non-Mormon political leadership in the West was dismayed by the immense sway of the Utah
church in the West, and devised a means to curtail it. They needed muscle from the East, but
Easterners couldn't care less about power struggles on the frontier. What would get them riled up,
though, was polygamy. Sex and drugs always sell newspapers. The republicans came into power on the
"twin relics of barbarism" crusade - ending slavery, and ending polygamy. The "ending polygamy"
part was mostly rhetorical for the duration of the civil war, but also for some time afterward.
While he lived, nobody took on Brigham Young. Not long after his death, however, the republicans
used laws against polygamy as the tool for dismantling the power of the Utah church. This posed
a significant dilemma, because religions have to pretend not to change. Their claim, after all, is
to divine and therefor timeless doctrines. For a time, Mormons fought the denial of their civil
right to marry anyone(s) they chose, as well as their civil right to exercise their religion.
But the fight had never been about marriage in the first place. It was about the balance of power
in the West. There would be and could be no letup on the putative grounds.

Dealing with this ruinous pressure took three forms.

One was a claim to a new divine revelation, ending (new) polygamy. It was announced, but has
never been published. No Utah Mormon leader, including Brigham Young, has dared to expose their
rhetorical style to comparison with Joseph Smith's.

Another was to continue the practice, but secretly, and limited to only the top leadership. That blew up under public scrutiny in the first decades of the last century.

The third was to create small groups of colonies, in remote places in the United States, as well
as in Mexico and Canada, to continue the practice. Polygamous groups thrive throughout rural Utah,
with large numbers in (and, pace Dave Barry, I am not making this up), the Fillmore-Beaver area.
Even in Provo I knew a girl who married her sister's husband. All the parties involved were
apparently willing, and I would be unable to speculate that either had better options than the one
that they chose.

The majority market share church disavows these groups, and claims that the top leadership exception was renegade, not official.To the Utah church, "Mormon" means exclusively members of
that organization, in part working to distance themselves from these embarrassing relics of its
history.

But there's another facet to this exclusion, which goes to the heart of the central phenomenon in
the Jewish religions, including, of course, Christianity, Islam, Protestantism, Mormonism. It's
inherit in the concept on "one god". The logic goes like this: there's only one god, so there's
only one truth, so there's only one true religion. The consequence of that logic is that it
centralizes religious power. Religion emerged, recall, as a kind of "7 habits of highly
successful people" set to personifiers. If we were creating that kind of system today, there'd
be a "god of being smart", a "god of being witty", a "god of being strong", a "god of being nice",
a "god of being honest", a "god of being reliable", a "god of having big boobs", and so on, each
with its own temple, Come to think of it, we do have that - we call them "the discovery channel",
"comedy central", "ESPN", "lifetime", "judge judy", "golf channel", and "cinemax", respectively.

But the Jewish religion centralizes all that power into a single personifier. Controlling that one
legacy means controlling the entire religion. The key insight, which goes back to Nathan, is that
this centralization of power has a deadly flaw - it sets a standard which is impossible to
sustain. On the face of it, that's useful, because it puts followers in a perpetual one-down
position. No matter how hard they try they will never measure up. But it also means that the
religious establishment can never measure up, either. If you're a priestess to the goddess of big
boobs, then it's clear what it means to measure up. If you're deficient in other ways, that can't
really be held against you. You never claimed to be a priestess to the goddess of being smart.

So a monotheistic religion is impervious to attacks from the left, but defenseless against attack
from the right. You can't convincingly tell a monotheist to lighten up, you can very convincingly
tell them that they're failing to measure up. You can't argue that the standards are wrong, but
it's easy to argue that the embodiment of those standards has become corrupt and fails to live
up to the ideals that those standards aspire to. While practically every book in "the Bible" was
written by a successful practitioner of this attack, the first wildly successful hijacking of the
religion, using this strategy, was that of Jesus.

To hijack a monotheistic system, however, it's not enough to offer an alternative of reform. You
must indict the incumbent. "Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, a generation of vipers". When the
great East/West split of Christianity occurred, each bishop excommunicated the other.
Protestantism, in turn, sprang from an indictment of the Western church, a denial of its
legitimacy. Joseph Smith fits squarely in this tradition, claiming a vision where Jesus told him
that "their creeds are an abomination", referring to all of the Christian sects at the time.

We can confidently predict that this pattern will continue for as long as the Jewish religious
tradition has power worth hijacking. And recall how dominant that tradition is: a billion
followers of Islam, half a billion Catholics, hundreds of millions of others. A significant
fraction of the world's population. Each must begin with an indictment of the old; the old will
always respond by excommunicating the new.

So we can answer the question. Just as Christians and Muslims are part of the Jewish religious
tradition, Mormons are a part of the Christian tradition. Just as Jews reject Christians as not
being Jewish, and Catholics reject Protestants as not being fully Christians, Protestants reject
Mormons as not being truly Christian. Mormons clearly are a distinct bifurcation of the tradition,
while claiming (as do they all) to be the authentic branch.

If you don't take religion seriously, more than that doesn't really matter. If you do, you put
down your money and you take your chances.




32 Drane, John. An Introduction to The Bible. ISBN 0745919103 p 778

Money is Life

The title is of course deliberately provocative. A simple "proof" is given by combining

"Time is money" - anonymous

with

"Lovest thou life? Then waste not time. For time's the stuff life's made of." - Benjamin Franklin

There is a deeper connection, however, which goes to the heart of something called "the time value
of money".

If you want to borrow money from a friend, you can do that fairly easily, as long as the amount
isn't too great, and as long as that friend is hoping to sleep with you.

Borrowing from strangers is a much more difficult deal. In fact, you generally have to pay for the
privilege. That payment is called interest. Several properties of interest are immediate.

The first is that, at least for amounts that aren't too big or too small, the interest cost is
proportional to the amount borrowed. To borrow twice as much money, you'll pay twice as much
interest. That's true because there's not a lot of difference between loaning you twice as much,
and loaning you half of that and loaning to somebody else the other half. The advantage of loaning
it all to you is that there's just one transaction to keep track of, but the advantage of loaning
part to you and part to somebody else is that there is less risk in doing that. If you fall on
hard times, maybe the other borrower is just fine. If the amounts are too small, the transaction
costs start to be a problem, if the amounts are too big, then the fact that there are few borrowers that you can safely lend to starts to matter. But generally the interest is proportional
to the amount you borrow.

A more subtle point is that interest compounds. This means that to borrow for two years, I have
to pay interest each of those two years. If I wait until the end of two years, I have to pay the
amount I borrowed, plus the first year's interest, plus the second year's interest, plus interest
for the second year for having borrowed the first year's interest, which would otherwise have been
due at the end of the first year. This is because borrowing for two years and paying it all back
at the end of two years is equivalent to paying back the loan, plus interest, at the end of the
first year, and then borrowing back the loan, plus the interest we just paid, for one more year.

But the real question is why do we have to pay interest at all? In the Jewish religious tradition,
which embraces also Christianity, Islam, Protestantism, Mormonism, there is provision for charging
interest, but also provision for weaseling out of debt. That tension has been resolved in
differing ways in the various groups, each of which claims to be the authentic embodiment of the
Middle Eastern religious tradition. In Islam, as historically in Christianity, charging interest
is a sin. But, in a beautiful reflection of the principle that "biology trumps religion every
time", paying interest is not. So as long as somebody is willing to be the sinner who lends, it's
ok to borrow.

The phenomenon is best understood in light of the Principle of Selection - that whatever is more
probable probably happens more. Two specific embodiments of the principle were taught by Darwin,
as the Principle of Natural Selection and the less celebrated but more important Principle of
Sexual Selection. Both of those concepts seem to get people riled up, but you don't have to
believe evolution of species to grasp the selection principles. If you believe species do not or
have not evolved, I'm sure it is nonetheless obvious to you that within any given species,
offspring do inherit traits from their parents. That traits which are heritable and which enhance
the probability of surviving will spread, while traits which are heritable and which curtail the
probability of surviving will tend to die out, is likewise obvious. That's the point of natural
selection.

Darwin's argument for evolution was, among many other points, the observation that an astonishing
degree of variation exists within any given species. Evolution of species is not a logical
consequence of natural selection. You have to either posit a mechanism for mutation of heritable
traits, or else that all possible traits are already dormant in any one living thing. The latter
possibility is highly unlikely in light of the known biochemistry of the cell, which, on the other
hand, does afford a mutation mechanism. But, again, none of this need be understood or accepted to
grasp the point of selection.

Sexual selection, on the other hand, is the observation that heritable traits which make you more
likely to have offspring are more likely to spread, while such traits that make you less likely to
have offspring are more likely to die out.

A stark example of this is given by the shaking quakers, who believed that all sex was punished by
a supernatural being, and who consequently had less sex. So little sex, in fact, that they've died
off completely. You can of course quibble as to what degree a religious belief is heritable. In
spite of my parents' most heroic efforts, I'm not saddled with their superstitions, and conversely
there are people who today are religious by consequence of my persuasive powers during the time
that I was. But selection principles don't need causality, only probability, so the illustration
does have some value.

A striking illustration of the relative importance of sexual selection for our own species is
provided by the study of human temperament. I learned this from Linda Behrens, but I believe it
comes from the work of David Keirsey, who distinguished four human temperaments, and identified a
core need associated with each. I use the highly insightful Behrens labels to describe them. For conceptualizers, that core need is competence. For stabilizers, that core need is responsibility,
to belong. For improvisers, being free to have an impact. For catalysts, being authentic and true
to themselves. Each of those needs has little to do with survival, per se, and everything to do
with being attractive.

So what does this have to do with money? Money has survival implications, but money also has
sexual selection implications. A humorous illustration of this fact is the "how to spot a
millionaire" series of pictures that's been circulating, showing an implausibly gorgeous woman
in the close company of an implausibly repulsive man. Money is just a value measure, so you could
imagine converting it all into a specific commodity. Imagine that there's a food that is perfectly nutritious and tastes better than anything you've ever had in your mouth, that you never tire of,
and that never goes bad. Having a stock of that food would guarantee you don't starve, that your
kids don't starve, that their kids don't starve... Having that stock of food would improve your
family's chance of surviving, but that fact alone would make it more attractive for others to join
their family with yours, to become breeding partners with your family members.

A thought experiment clarifies this completely. If you're male, and doubt the outcome, ask any
female. A woman finds herself torn between two suitors, who are equal in every way. Equally smart,
equally witty, equally charming, equally handsome, ... She likes them equally well. One day, each
one buys a lottery ticket. One of them wins. The other does not. What happens?

So here is the dilemma. If I have money, I can use that money to be attractive today. Buy a nice
house, get nice clothes, take dance classes, get a nice car, get a personal trainer, whatever.
But I can also lend that money out. Just for illustration, suppose I can lend out $1000, and be
assured of getting back, in a year's time, $1,000,000,000. The amount is unrealistically large,
obviously. That's the point. By making it a caricature the essential feature becomes clear. Being
a billion dollars worth of attractive in a year beats hands down being a thousand dollars worth of
slightly more attractive today. Viewed in this way, it's obvious why when interest rates are too
low, nobody will lend, while when interest rates are high enough, anyone will. Sexual selection
forces it. To forgo potential offspring today with no payback of more offspring in the future is
a biologically losing proposition. To forgo a payback of large numbers of offspring in the future
for a marginal chance of more offspring now is an equally losing proposition.

Thus interest rates, fundamentally, must fall at the arbitrage point, where any lower rate of
interest would not increase the chance of future offspring enough to compensate for chances now,
while any higher rate would penalize the borrowers future offspring options too much to compensate
for the momentary gain. The exponential structure of offspring is mirrored in the compounding time
value of money.

With this lens, it's clear why people kill over money, just as they kill over sexual betrayal, and
harm to their children. It's never "only money", when money is offspring, money is life.