happy birthday, mary! Okay, I didn't bake Mary a cake, but I caused a cake to appear at the end of our birthday feast. I told Mary she should be really impressed with how many ingredients are in the cake: I love you, Mary! a theory of everything - part two Humans tend to sort themselves into groups. One group becomes dominant and alters the rules and norms of the culture to advantage their group (and consequently disadvantage the other group). Over time, the advantages of the dominant group grow because of cyclical positive reinforcement. The members of the dominant group marry each other and so amplify the traits they deem desirable. Parents evolve and learn to advantage children, even at a very young age, who demonstrate the traits of the desired phenotype. This is one of the more shocking conclusions in The Social Genome (Conley): that parents raise children differently, and that they do so based on the DNA of their children, beginning at a very early age. So the selected trait (education, for example) is reinforced at multiple levels: genetic, parenting, and cultural. In The Social Genome, Dalton Conley spends by far the most time talking about “education PGI.” Let me refresh your memory from two weeks ago. We now have large databases where the entire genome of many humans has been recorded. Social geneticists take a trait, like obtaining a degree in higher education, and ask if there are any gene sets that predict this outcome. They find a gene set containing about one thousand genes, that predicts the outcome of higher education (this is what is called the education PGI (polygenic index). They then test this set prospectively. They swab the cheeks of babies and run their genome. They then predict, based on this cheek swab, which babies will go on to obtain a university degree. This confirms that the education PGI has significant predictive power (“significant” but not absolute). We can understand the evolutionary purpose of social sorting. The proclivity to gather information, for example, might confer fitness for individuals of our species. A kind of human especially good at this might create a cultural environment (like a university) that reinforces the advantage of knowledge. More universities - more prestigious universities - might over time divide human cultures into the haves and have nots. Sorting creates social tension, and this brings us to my ‘theory of everything:' our genes and epigenetics determine our politics, but in complicated ways that are now being sorted out. In the USA, the equating of education and merit has been through many generations of positive reinforcement. It has now become unfair insofar as many educated people lack real, useful knowledge; and many people without formal education are very deserving. When the gap between the haves and have nots becomes too wide, something will inevitably come along to spark a sort of revolt against the status quo. Donald Trump did not discover the unfairness of education. He wasn’t even early to recognize it. I would refer the reader especially to Michael Sandel’s book The Tyranny of Merit. But Trump gave a voice to anti-education. Even his manner of speech is a hymn to simplification. The particular threat that Trump poses is exactly this: his crusade against education. It would be one thing to want to decrease the income and wealth gap that currently separates university graduates from non-graduates. But it is another thing altogether to actually punish education. photography: what do I want? Joining a photo club has brought me into a dialogue with other photographers. Readers will remember my discussions about the aesthetics of photography inspired by Dominic McIvor Lopes. His claim is that aesthetic values are community projects; communities of many people with different ideas, but communities comprised of individuals who all want to "do the right thing." This in itself is a powerful insight: that people can be joined by a desire for the common good even though they have different values (perhaps we would say slightly different values). I'm not sure if my local photo club is representative of the larger photography culture or not, but one hardly ever sees straightforward landscape photographs put forward for competition. I decided to put three landscape photographs into our last coaching night, and they went over like a lead balloon. I'm a bit frustrated. I love landscape photography. I think modern cameras together with all the post-processing that's now available, has made people think that a straightforward shot of the world doesn't cut it anymore.