Rhopperties or Grhopperties Which Will It Be?

The Journal of Loose Ends

In this edition of the Journal of Loose Ends we bring you a study which comes perilously close to science. Please bear with us. It takes some time to reveal itself, but the study’s subject  is something called strong emergence, and so unrelated to science in principle.

The original publisher was BioPsychoEvo Proceedings whose catchy title drove both The Journal of Evolutionary Biology and The Proceedings of the Center of Excellence in Evolutionary Psychology extinct about a century ago.

The planet Schplich is home to a small, frog-like  creature called the Green Hopper. Everything about Schplich is frog-like. The weather is damp and cool. The ground is mossy and the sky is gray. Combined with a lack of larger predators, the environment constitutes a Green Hopper paradise. Yet, the Green Hopper teeters on the brink of extinction.

The existential threat to the Green Hopper comes from something called the Red Hopper. As of publication, the Red Hopper remains a “something “. It defies categorization because it is missing a big chunk of context, lost when it emerges and supplants all the evolutionary, genetic, and localizing causes associated with a Hopper’s constituents. The Red Hopper resembles a red, post-apocalyptic version of the Green Hopper. It is about 20% larger than the average Green, with long claws and teeth. It is fast and aggressive. Its only natural predators are other Red Hoppers. The most horrific fact about the Red Hopper is its source: it emerges from Green Hopper eggs when conditions are right.

Green Hoppers rely on an abundant mossy plant for 85% of their sustenance. The plant has three structures in order of frequency and inverse nutritional value: bud, fruiting body, and flower. Green Hoppers feed on those plant structures in order of nutrient concentration. They covet the rich bits, but they are lazy creatures by nature and competition for the delectables is intense. No Green Hopper ever starves, however.

Throughout their adult lives Green Hoppers lay a single egg daily. The egg does the things we expect of eggs – it sits around, matures, hatches – unless the Green Hopper that laid it has shifted it’s diet to include more buds than flowers and fruiting bodies combined. In that case, the egg does something completely unexpected and hatches a Red Hopper.

A chemical called budesine causes the change. Found naturally in buds from the Green Hopper’s dietary staple, budesine remains bound to chemicals in the other, more nutritious parts of the plant. Green Hoppers cannot absorb the  bound form of budesine, but they take up 100% of unconjugated budesine. Once in the Green Hopper’s bloodstream, budesine binds to a proto-histone in the Green Hopper’s nucleic acid and the transformation to Red Hopper begins.

The Red Hoppers eat only other Hoppers. Besides their formidable teeth and claws, Red Hoppers’ saliva is venomous. Worst of all from the Green Hopper’s standpoint, Red Hoppers also lay an egg daily which hatches another Red Hopper.

The Red Hopper lifestyle is a nightmare for the Green Hoppers. It’s nearly as bad for the evolutionary astrobiologists who study the Hoppers. The problem is not with the activity of budesine. We know that it is a chemical in the environment. We know how it acts on the histone. We can even guess why budesine took on its role as mediator of Red Hopper reproduction, and so what it is.

The trouble is the Red Hopper instructions in the Green Hopper genome. How did they get there? Why are they there?

No one has proposed a reasonable evolutionary rationale – because there isn’t one. Evolutionary changes produce some advantage in reproductive fitness. A cursory examination suggests the Red  Hopper outbreaks might make more food available  to the Green Hoppers that harbored the Red genes, but it doesn’t hold up to statistical analysis.

For any given Green Hopper, its proximity to a Red Hopper hatch inversely correlates with survival. Red hopper outbreaks affect the Green hoppers like any other natural disaster. It should be possible, in theory, to assign probabilities to food supply, total green hopper population, local quantities of the same and initial focus of the breakout. The analysis would give you the odds, but like a statistical hurricane, the victims would have to live through it before earthmovers, aid matériel managers, and rescue crews could evaluate the scene and determine the needs left in the wake of the storm. The statistics matter for the storm, although not very much. They mean nothing for the total Green Hopper population. In most cases, they will be wiped out and the outbreak will select for nothing – any more than the storm would.

Imagine coming upon a Red Hopper in the wilderness. If you managed to kill it and examine the body, there is nothing that could tell you where it came from or how long it had been alive, it has taken over the causal story of the Hoppers.

The individual Hopper is no longer the hatchling of the third Hopper on the left in the southern Big Lake, who ate 10 flowers, two buds and two fruiting bodies last Thursday. It is the Hopper transformed from Green to Red. All of its identifying information in its previous base, held together as an identity by chains of causal explanation goes away and the brute fact of the Red Hopper’s existence takes over. If this is true, at some time in the future, we are in for a very unpleasant surprise.

As we investigate more phenomena like the Red Hopper, we will see that they behave as brute facts – properties which explain, but are not explained. We will begin to find districts where one of these properties has emerged and involuted leaving an area of unstable identities and  complex behaviors which resolve themselves according to a narrow set of possibilities with limited reference to surrounding structure. Starlings may flock together and turn in unison from that point on because there is nothing  subeveneing their flocking behavior at that level. The equivalent matrix of causal interactions, could be present, but it needn’t  be. The probability of its existence is low given the host of items, events, and properties that explain themselves in their relationship to a subvenience
base or causal matrix. Our emerging Red Hoppers will turn out to have an explanatory cause in the activities of some amateur geneticist with a nasty sense of humor. Rest assured.