intellectual carcinization

climbing the mountain from different angles

(business intrudes, so another off-cut from my current manuscript, I’m afraid…)

“Carcinization” is a curious phenomenon of evolutionary biology.  It refers to the tendency of a wide variety of life-forms to develop, over time, into something that looks like a crab. 

It’s happened several times, which is to say that there are five or six types of beast which you or I would just refer to as “crabs” but which are quite definitely genetically distinct from one another. Each of them seems to have evolved to its current shape from something which did not look particularly like a crab and which did not necessarily even look all that much like any of the other things which evolved into a crab. 

There is no particularly clear explanation of why carcinization happens; the best guess anyone can make is that for some set of evolutionary problems, the crab-like morphology is a good solution, so it's one that gets arrived at from a variety of different starting points.

I have to say that when I first read about carcinization, it unnerved me.  Ever since that date, I’ve occasionally been stricken by worries that I might be turning into a crab myself. 

Although obviously evolutionary development doesn’t work that way, I’ve been looking in the mirror while shaving to make sure I’m not developing gills, and occasionally wondering whether I’m walking sideways more than I used to.  Is there some slow arc of the universe, some gravitational pull which will eventually turn every living thing into a crab?

It often happens to be the case that different groups of people or organisations have similar problems to solve.  Unsurprisingly, they tend to invent similar systems for doing so; armies all over the world have uniforms and ranks, for example. 

There is a lot of actual copying, often over surprising distances of time and space, but there’s also a lot of the equivalent of carcinization.  All over the world, any economic system that’s too large to be based on single household production seems to end up inventing an equivalent of money and an equivalent of debt. 

(This was one of my disagreements with David Graeber - in my view, the fact that empires and rulers invented the institution of debt is no more interesting than the fact that NASA invented the non stick frying pan[1]. There’s nothing intrinsically imperial about debt - it’s just that emperors were the first people in history to have the problem for which something like debt and taxes is the solution.)

“False crabs” behave and look like crabs, but they often don’t have anything like the same internal organisation and systems. And this is also something that has analogies in the social and intellectual world.

Policy economists have developed a lot of institutions, arrangements and rules of thumb which look like cybernetics, but as far as I can tell, having worked and lived with a few, these are purely the result of having to solve a lot of the same problems; there’s almost no overlap in the literature and economists who don’t work in active policy fields often have very different basic assumptions.

All this means that when you find someone who seems to agree with you on a particular point of importance, it’s as well to check for intellectual carcinization. 

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[1] actually they didn’t, but give me a break here.