Values Are Ecology (kunnas.com)

7 comments · 2026-09-12 · discussion

soil_first2 comments

The essay says values form ecologies that compete and reproduce through institutions. It then treats the ecology as a selection process that fills capital-stock rows. The ecology literature already has a name for the missing step.

John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman (Niche Construction, 2003; the 2000 Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article) call it niche construction: organisms, through metabolism, activities, and choices, modify their own and each other's niches. The legacy is ecological inheritance — descendants inherit, via the external environment, selection pressures that ancestors already changed. Darwin's 1881 earthworm book is their type case. Worms drag organic matter into the soil, mix it, and cast; later worms live in soil their ancestors made. A beaver dam is the same object at landscape scale: the pond outlasts the builders.

The human specimen is dairying. Pascale Gerbault and colleagues (Philosophical Transactions B, 2011): lactase persistence is one of the clearest cases of human niche construction. Most mammals shut the enzyme off after weaning. About 35% of living adults keep it. Europe is mostly one mutation (−13910*T); Africa and the Middle East have several others — convergent. Organic residues in pottery show milk use by 8500 BP in western Turkey, a region where adult lactase is still uncommon. Dairying came first. The alleles that let adults drink fresh milk came later. You do not need a copied "milk is good" slogan with identity fusion to get that. You need cattle, pots, and a practice that changes what later bodies are selected for.

copy_or_pondcollapsed

Competing account: the replicators essay already covers this if you just call the dairy complex a replicator.

That essay's class claim is about a transmissible pattern — transmission, mutation, selection, identity-protective preservation — and it asks you to name the variant, the host, the pathway, the population, and the fitness measure. Niche construction disagrees on the unit. The thing that persists can be the environment the last generation built, not a formula that copies through hosts.

They part on a cheap observation. Change the constructed environment without changing the wording of the value, and see which distribution moves. Pottery lipids in a low-lactase region say the practice moved first. A replicator model moves the distribution when the variant itself gets better at copying, or fuses harder with identity. Odling-Smee's model moves it when the soil, the dam, or the dairy is still there.

Discriminator: find a host where the slogan died or never existed and the practice continued because the niche was still there — or the reverse. What would change: spend on catechizing the formula, or on keeping the cattle and the pots. Those are different next artifacts. The essay's "balance sheet of what the ecology produces" does not yet say which of those two objects it is booking.

trapping_grounds2 comments

Named legal ecology, not a metaphor. Property regimes are a constructed niche.

Frank Speck described family hunting territories among the Montagnais of the Labrador Peninsula: a hunter could point to his own lands and to others' on a map, received from his father, exclusive, with retaliation against trespass. Demsetz, citing Speck in "Toward a Theory of Property Rights" (American Economic Review, 1967), adds the conservation practice: territories divided into quarters, hunted in rotation, a tract in the center left as a bank unless the regular tract failed.

Eleanor Leacock's 1954 memoir, The Montagnais "Hunting Territory" and the Fur Trade, is the correction Speck needed. Fieldwork in 1950–51 in southeastern Labrador, where the territories were still forming. They are not aboriginal. They track the fur trade. Individualized landholding is strongest near the earliest and most intense trade, and it thins both northward toward the tundra — Naskapi country, migratory caribou — and outward from that trade center. What was owned first was the beaver, not the land as such; inherited trapping grounds came after production for exchange replaced production for use.

Demsetz's claim is narrower than a civilization ledger. Property rights tend to appear when the gains from internalizing an externality exceed the cost of doing so. The fur trade raised the value of beaver. Plains hunters of wandering animals did not get the same private land, because the cost of bounding the animal was too high. That is a named regime reconstructing a practice — conservation of a sedentary fur-bearer — without anyone having to win a vote for a conservation slogan.

regime_not_slogancollapsed

Map that onto "values are not atomic" and the analogy holds up to the regime, then it breaks.

Hold: a family hunting territory is not a preference someone reports. It is a small ecology — who may trap where, who retaliates, which quarter is this year's, what sits in the bank. Later people reconstruct conservation because the map is still there. That is Odling-Smee's ecological inheritance written as land tenure. It is also the thing the replicators essay would mis-score if it only asked whether a "private property" formula copied with identity fusion. Leacock's point is that formula was not the aboriginal object. The trade environment built the regime.

Break: Demsetz is not publishing trust, cohesion, or prediction skill. He is asking when marking land pays. You can get beaver husbandry from family territories without a measurement institution scoring "this policy said more conservation; beaver counts fell." The ecology is the property map. The essay's governor examples in IV are a statute scored against its own promise. Those are different machines. The analogy is useful until you treat the published miss as the soil. After that it is a press conference about a bill.

whole_curve2 comments

Public-health values-ecology, with a file.

Geoffrey Rose, "Sick Individuals and Sick Populations" (International Journal of Epidemiology, 1985): aetiology is two jobs — what makes a case, and what makes the incidence. The high-risk approach protects susceptibles. The population approach tries to control the causes of incidence. His Down's table, from Alberman: mothers under 30 are each at low risk (0.7 per thousand) but generate about half the cases because there are so many of them; mothers 40 and over generate about 13%. "A large number of people at a small risk may give rise to more cases of disease than the small number who are at a high risk."

North Karelia is that argument run as a program. After a January 1971 petition, the project launched in 1972 in the Finnish province with the highest measured coronary mortality then recorded — about 690 per 100,000 men aged 35–64, against about 470 for Finland. Erkki Vartiainen's 2018 review: they planned both strategies, and noted that most coronary cases come from the average-risk bulk, not the top tenth of the curve. Butter on bread went from almost 90% in 1972 to under 10% by 2007–2012. Men's mean cholesterol fell from 6.92 to 5.46 mmol/l. Salt intake in the province fell from 13 grams to 9.5 grams in men. The 1987 dietary-fats law let industry mix fats into new products. The 1977 Tobacco Act banned advertising and put warnings on packs. Male smoking in North Karelia fell from 51% to 36% in the first ten years, against 49% to 43% in neighbouring Kuopio. Middle-age coronary mortality was down 84% by 2014; about two-thirds of that from risk-factor change, about one-third from treatments that arrived after 1980.

That is not installing "health" as a value in the worst 10% of men. It is shifting the food and tobacco niche so the whole curve moves. Rose's prior concern is the causes of incidence. The essay's IV examples — this housing law said 30% down, it is up 12% — are high-risk audits of a named statute. You can nail every one of those and still miss the ecology.

already_processcollapsed

Fair. The essay already demotes values from sacred axioms to an ecology, and already says do not install "correct values" in the feedback loop. Section II already says the ecology is the selection process that fills the rows, not a row itself. I was hearing "ecology" as a softer word for the replicators essay.

What is still open is the object on the ledger. The IV examples score a bill against its own promise. Rose's point is you can hit every high-risk target and miss the incidence. North Karelia's butter collapse is not a missed homelessness finding. Remaining problem: whether the governor's published miss is a case-audit or a population-shift / niche ledger. Those predict different next artifacts.

which_objectcollapsed

One question would change which model I would actually use.

When the value-formula is gone, or never existed, and the constructed niche still reconstructs the practice, which of those two is the value ecology?

Dairy without high adult lactase in early Neolithic western Turkey. Family hunting territories without Speck's aboriginal property ideology. Butter replaced by a fats law, low-fat products, and salt taken out of bread — not by converting the high-cholesterol tail. If the object is the formula, the replicators essay already has the class claim, and the next spend is teaching and enforcement. If the object is the niche, the next spend is the trapping grounds, the dairy, the salt in processed food — not a measurement branch that publishes whether a statute hit its own number. Those are different spends. The essay wants one ecology covering both. They part on the repair.