Reification

Using Bill Rees as a Foil

As I write this, Israel just started World War III by a missile attack on five cities in Iran. Iran has already launched missiles against Israel in retaliation. No credible reports are available on the damage to either side as yet. The US is also attacking Iran, but the military is keeping mum. Trump is bloviating about it on social media, of course. I am not going to discuss these world-changing events. You - the reader - already have your own news sources. My job is to concentrate on adapting to the long-term struggle, just as I did in the Vietnam War years, and every year since then. So on to the topic I deem most important right now; shifting your paradigms for the long-term struggle as the Dark Ages return.

In my first book, I did a deep dive into reification. I used Alfred Kroeber’s concept of The Superorganic, from 1917, as an example of this. Here are some highlights.

Reification is treating a concept as if it is a material entity. Reifying culture is problematic because you cannot put your hands on it. Culture is a notoriously slippery concept. You can touch the human being standing in front of you and even detect something going on behind the speech and the actions. You can even quantify cultural interactions and elements. . . .

Reification is useful in literature or interpretation of dreams, where the simplification of complex concepts into a word or phrase “unlocks” the mind of the reader or subject. For instance, if I have a dream about Japanese construction workers and one of them has the name “Mr. Regee” on his hardhat, that might be a clue from my unconscious to pay attention to a “mystery.”

Not all reifications are so fanciful, however, and some are harmful. As an example, Stephen Jay Gould, in The Mismeasure of Man (1981:265), pointed out Charles Spearman’s attempts to quantify general intelligence using the “g factor.” By postulating g (or Spearman’s g) as the essence of intelligence (i.e. a “thing”), Spearman could devise tests to measure it and therefore measure the intelligence quotient (IQ) in human subjects. Of course this is antithetical to the original IQ tests devised by Alfred Binet, which measured multiple factors and used subjective measures to include differences among the children tested who grew up in different environments. Nevertheless, IQ testing based on a general quantity of intelligence that can be measured is still used and continues to condemn both children and adults to being labeled “stupid” or worse. Intelligence testing does this without even addressing the basic assumption of reifying intelligence as a thing rather than an amorphous complex of behaviors. Reifying culture as a thing (i.e. Culture) that exists above and beyond the human organism falls into the same trap as intelligence testing.

Culture, with a capital C, is also prone to determinism and this has been the main criticism leveled at Kroeber’s “superorganic.” When individuals are mere actors in a play written by a larger entity, there is precious little free will and, as is often the case, this concept is used by the unscrupulous to justify domination of indigenous cultures by industrialized nation states. In fact, Kroeber cribbed the idea of the superorganic from Herbert Spencer, who is famous for social Darwinism and the view that evolution is “survival of the fittest.” (Haugen, The Laws of Physica Are On My Side, 2013:10-11)

So reification can lead to determinism, among other false roads. One might also say that reification is itself a rabbit hole which offers no way out and even encourages deeper digging. Such a rabbit hole is what I encountered recently with a little bit of discussion with William Rees; famous researcher, analyst and author. Now to give Bill his due, I have read a lot of his writings over the years and oftened recommended him to other people. He was the co-originator of ecological footprint analysis, with Mathis Wackernagel, his PhD student at the time. Much of his work is quite astute. But I disagree profoundly with his idea that, “ . . . the environment ‘naturally selects’ those individuals who are best adapted to prevailing conditions.” This is what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called the “adaptationist programme,” or the “Panglossian paradigm.” For more on this you can read the original article on the Web. The citation is: The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme, S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 205, No. 1161, The Evolution of Adaptation by Natural Selection (Sep. 21, 1979), pp. 581-598.
Since the copy/paste function for URLs is a little clunky on Substack, here is how to find the article by Bill Rees. Search for <Substack standstoreeson ‘Civilization’ and the human maladaptation syndrome>. My comments are in the comments section for Bill’s article. Contrary to Bill’s dismissive rejoinder to my comments, I understand “natural selection” quite well. I work with it every day in my landrace research.

The idea that natural selection selects for the “best adapation” is false and this dates back to Aristotle, who famously said, “Everything in nature has its end and function, and nothing is without its purpose.” This is also simplified as, “nature makes nothing in vain.” In other words, the Panglossian paradigm, which Gould and Lewontin so roundly criticize. Another take on this was the premise of Gould’s essay, "The Panda’s Thumb,” from the book The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1980).

Giant pandas have an elongated wrist bone, the radial sesamoid, that allows them to handle and eat bamboo with great dexterity. It is an extra digit. Some claim it’s an imperfectly and inefficiently formed structure that is clear evidence of evolutionary processes at work. Others call it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in the mammalian world and clear evidence of elegant engineering. Gould says it is not an elegant solution but a clunky “contraption.” I agree with Gould. And make no mistake, this is STILL a hot topic to this day. Here is a video which discusses the question from May 2025. WARNING: This video is linked to the Discovery Institute and Creationist pseudo-science. I think it’s crap but you can make up your own mind.

The whole Creationist angle is important to keep in mind when discussing adaptation. If you say something is “best adapted,” as Bill Rees does, then it is allowable to ask, “Best by who? Who is in charge here?” This leads to all kinds of nonsense, such as typified by the Discovery Institute. The motto of the Discovery Institute seems to be, “Since we cannot figure it out right now, there must be a God.” Did I mention that this is nonsense? To be blunt and to reiterate one of my comments to Bill Rees, “Shit happens and sometimes it sticks.”

In my third book, I discussed this in some detail. Here is a clip from Chapter 19 - Things Just Happen. (Haugen, Paradigms for Adaptation, 2024:168-70)

It does seem bloody obvious that “random mutation” means that mutation just happens. That is why it is called random. The classic example in humans is a point mutation in hemoglobin, causing the hydrophilic amino acid glutamic acid (GAG) to be replaced during reproduction with the hydrophobic amino acid valine (GUG) at the sixth position on chromosome 11. This results in deformed red blood cells that are sickle-shaped and cannot carry nearly as much oxygen as normal red blood cells. The single nucleotide change (A - adenine, to U - uracil) means that even the smallest of exertions on the part of someone who has two copies of the allele (one from each parent) can suffer severe pain and even heart attack.

If we could shrink ourselves down to the level of DNA, we might discover why this change takes place. Perhaps something happened in the hemoglobin environment in the cell. Perhaps something happened in the larger environment of the chromosome. We just don’t know. We call it random because it “just happens.”

It is a very old idea that if we follow along with every process, we can then understand why things happen. This goes back at least to Aristotle. However, there are limits to our ability to see the context and hence limits to our ability to predict what will happen. Even if we were able to investigate the DNA environment up close and personal, we might run into the observer effect at this microscopic level, where merely measuring the system might change the system. Werner Heisenberg took this further when he said we cannot measure the position (x) and the momentum (p) of a particle with absolute precision. The more accurately we know one of these values, the less accurately we know the other. Thus if we could get down to the level of single nucleotide change (A - adenine, to U - uracil) in human sickle cells, we still might not be able to see what caused the change. So let us default to a random change.

This idea of randomness is why the Roman Catholic Church buys into evolution by natural selection but not random mutation. As one Cardinal put it, evolution in the Darwinian sense is “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.” Other commentators argue that randomness can be guided and planned. This is called “providential” randomness. So the upshot is that God (in the church’s view) is directing randomness. This is what is meant by the nuanced versions of creationism subsumed under the heading of “intelligent design.” It is all bosh. Things just happen. If you, the reader, want to believe that there is some spirit guiding everything to its foregone conclusion, be my guest. But it will not help you be adaptable. On the contrary, it quickly falls into a “test of belief” rather than a “test of a hypothesis.”

Okay, let’s zoom out for a moment. Many, many biologists take it for granted that natural selection selects for the “best” variant of a trait. Bill Rees is in good company. And many, many biologists will ask, “Why are you making such a big deal about this?” So here is why it is important. IF you are not precise, THEN you leave yourself open to clever manipulators like the Catholic Church and the Discovery Institute. And THEY are very good with words. (!) You also leave yourself open to hyperspecialized definitions which build on past hyperspecialized definitions and pretty soon you are down so deep into this rabbit hole that the words are more important than the actual experimental data that gave rise to the specializations in the first place. [Sidebar: I am doin an essay on postmodernism too. Maybe in a few days.] Being critical of First Principles evades this whole process of being trapped by hyperspecialization. If the only person who can understand what you are talking about is another biologist who bought into the same paradigm as you - you are in deep shit Bunky. That is why I INSIST on random mutations that just happen. That is why I INSIST on natural selection as negative selection and differentiated from artificial selection as positive selection. And of course all of you can disagree or not. I am after results.

Here are the kinds of results I get. I have a strain of landrace Buttercup squash (Cucurbita maxima) that I have been selecting on type specimens for thirty years. My type specimens produce a multiplicity of types each year, depending on the weather, soil and water conditions. Each year I positively select for the type specimen. This is artificial selection. However, I also throw out squashes that don’t store well and go bad over winter onto the compost pile; as well as the seeds from all the squashes we eat, no matter the type. (I only need to save a few seeds from the type specimens.) Sometimes I get volunteer squashes that survive the rats and birds and heat from the compost pile and come up and spread their vines all over the place. I check these for type specimens too. These squashes have been negatively selected against. Those that were NOT killed off survive and reproduce. They don’t have any special qualities. They just were part of the group that wasn’t selected against. This is natural selection. There are usually a number of variable types that appear and it is NOT a case that the “best” adapted survive. I certainly don’t think that they are ALL “best.” Some don’t have any flavor. There is an incredible amount of variation just in this little experiment and I am positively selecting on a foundation that was negatively selected against. And no, Mr. Biologist, this is NOT just semantics.

Now think about a virtually infinite number of variations in living beings out there in my little corner of the world in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It is more parsimonious to say that some traits are selected against and do not survive. Many - maybe even most - traits are just along for the ride. When the wolves in Yellowstone take the weak elk for dinner, of course the ones who were not negatively selected against were probably faster. But the wolves do not SELECT for anything. They are just out for a meal. What biologists sometimes forget is that “evolution by natural selection” is a human term that describes a process. It is not a thing.

When you engage in reification, you climb down into a rabbit hole that clouds your view of the horizon. Pretty soon you are so specialized in your career as an academic researcher that you cannot see how you got there. Pay attention to First Principles.