Roll Your Dice
Let’s imagine a world of ageless humans in which pernicious deities control overpopulation by striking certain human beings with lightning. These humans are chosen according to a six-sided die carried by each person. Every morning at 9:00 am, everyone at the age of 5 or over rolls their die. The gods observe and keep a running tally of who has rolled what: whenever someone rolls their 1000th “6″, they are instantly vaporised by divine lightning. On their fifth birthday, each child receives their own die replicated using the weight characteristics from both parents’ dice. This replication process involves small imperfections.
Perhaps you can see where this is going. No die is perfect, and for any given die, the precise probabilities of rolling each of the six outcomes are not exactly equal. The biases for each die may be almost imperceptible, but over the course of thousands of rolls, they will emerge. Those with dice that are biased toward “6″ will, overall, live shorter lives and consequently have less children with similar dice. Each new child’s die may be biased slightly toward or away from “6″ as a result of the imperfect parent-dice-melding process, and again, these changes will tend to accumulate to anti-”6″ die. Given enough time in this world, we would expect that across thousands of generations, dice would become less and less inclined to land on “6″.
But then, the dice-obsessed deities realise that the humans have evolved a resistance to their form of elimination. And so they change the fatal number from “6″ to “4″ overnight. The human population starts falling as people hit their 1000th “4″s, and the process begins anew.
Hopefully you’ve already drawn some of the parallels to evolution in our own world. Our “dice” are our entire bodies — our every reflex and every cell. The “deities” are our natural environment, including everything from the universal gravitational constant and Earth’s precise mass to other life forms and even each other. The “fatal numbers” for our dice are sourced from a continuum, have varying strengths (represented in the metaphor by the requirement of 1000 rolls — less required rolls would mean a stronger fatal number), and differ in different locales. The “imperfect replication” is the process of sexual reproduction, which sources from each parent and involves slight translational errors that lead to a revised individual genetic code.
But I didn’t finish the metaphor: eventually, humans became sufficiently advanced to alter their own dice and even bargained with the deities to increase the number of required rolls. The new fight for survival became focused on human behaviour and social interaction. Wars stopped being about land and started being about dice. Factions of humans with a focus on a particular number or set of numbers formed, and whoever carried the most power had the ability to manipulate the fatal numbers.
I’ll let you figure out the allegories to our society.
I understand that we are advanced enough to alter are own dice through technology and advances in medicine, genetics, agriculture, etc. I’m not quite sure if believe that societies are fighting over the dice. Maybe we are indirectly, because we’re fighting over resources, money and power.
I like the blend of science, philosophy, sociology and psychology in this post.