(Grampa dozing on chesterfield. T.V. is on. Enter William, Ayla, and Lochlann. Ayla shuts off t.v. Grampa starts up. There’s an awkward moment, then they all laugh.)

Grampa: Thieves! Help! Oh! False alarm. It’s just mischievous kids. Lochlann. Yay!

Lochlann: Professional day for our school. I thought I’d join these guys.

Grampa: What grade are you in now?

Lochlann: Nine. But that doesn’t mean I can’t think just as well as these two. Sorry about scaring you.

Ayla: We like to make him jump. He doesn’t get mad, or at least not very often.

Grampa: It’s okay. I sleep too much, anyway. Back for more are you, Will?

William: Well …yes. I can’t see how values like courage and wisdom ever got to be so – respected, I think is the right word – all over. By the way, you two, I’m picking up where we left off on Tuesday, when Josh and Liam were here.

Ayla: I know. I get it. Grampa and I have had this talk in the past. Or ones like it.

Grampa: So. To cut to the chase, as the idiom goes, a few really general values get widely accepted and used to guide behavior in daily life – and in crisis situations, for that matter – when more of the people who live by them survive better over thousands of years.

W: And you’re saying that’s where values come from?

G: The most general ones, yes. There’s no other way to account for the fact that those few values are so widespread, Will. In almost every society that is or ever has been.

W: Alright. Suppose we accept that hypothesis or model of social evolution, if you like. Then why are there so many disputes over values and morés. Those disputes are what wars are started over. I mean people must be pretty attached to their morés, values, customs, habits …whatever you want to call them, if they are ready to kill one another over the differences between their ways and some other tribe’s ways. And it keeps happening. We’ve got people in all parts of the world right now who’ll fight to the death to keep their way of life from alien intrusions. Alien. Foreign. Infidel. Heathens. Gaijin. Gwailo. There must be a thousand terms.

G: I think humans have a gene built in that makes them suspicious of outsiders.

W: What would be the use of that? Of our being tilted in the direction of going to war, in other words? Are you saying a desire to make war is built into us?

G: It has been for a long time, Will.

W: But why? That gene – it’s a gene, you’re saying, not some learned behavior – you’re saying it’s built in and it has survived as long as humans have been human.

G: That’s right.

W: Well, I don’t get it. That would make no sense. Killing off the young men or sometimes nearly all of some tribe. That would make us less likely to survive and go on, not more likely.

G: There were more people, more human beings, alive in the world at the end of World War Two than there were at the start.

W: What?! That can’t be right.

L: No, he’s right, Will. Even in grade nine, we read about World War Two. And I have read more on my own. My dad’s books.  

W: Alright. That is a surprise. So then, Grampa … I mean, why? Why all that loss of life and all that grieving for millions of people? And not just in that war. History is made of wars, it seems.

G: Wars test cultural fitness, Will.

W: That’s Nazism. That’s Hitler, right down the line.

G: No, he thought wars tested racial fitness, and that’s nonsense. Humans are all one species. The idea of there being races of humans is an empty concept.  

W: That I knew. But let’s not get sidetracked. War has been toughening us for eons then? Is that what you’re saying?

G: Yes. But let’s be careful here. War has been toughening us culturally. Our technologies and economies have been getting tougher via wars. But genetically we have probably gone down a bit. We save people who would have died in cave people’s days. From defects, congenitally acquired diseases, and things like that. And those people breed and their genes stay in the gene pool. But weaker morés, values, customs, and so on …those things get pounded out of existence because the people who believe in less effective values and customs don’t compete as well as people who have a little more efficient sets of values and customs and so on.

A: And economies and technologies.

G: That’s right.

A: So are you implying that the superior …that’s a scary, fascist-sounding word … but anyway, are you implying that superior technologies and economies come from a society’s valuing courage and wisdom? Over centuries, of course.  

G: There’s no other way to explain them, Ayla. On the face of it, this talk all seems very scary and upsetting, but notice that there are also compassionate instincts in us as well. We may beat a culture and the nation that follows it to its knees, but we hardly ever exterminate it totally. At the end of the war – the Second World War – the Allies decided to loan money to Germany and Japan so those countries could re-build. Nearly all US loans, by the way. Very compassionate. It’s probably why those countries are basically loyal to the democracies of the West now. We are learning to change our cultural codes by less cruel means. I believe that, but we have to look at the scale of millions of people and thousands of years to begin to see these trends.    

W: And really general values like courage and wisdom inform the whole rest of the cultural code of a country? Or any successful country, anyway?

G: That’s right.

L: I’m going to jump in here. So why in your model are there so many variations on these large-scale themes?

G: Sharp, sharp question. Well, done. But just like gene codes, cultural codes have to keep experimenting. The world – the physical world – keeps changing in ways we can’t anticipate. Not because the shifts are so hard to anticipate; because they can’t be anticipated. A computer as big as this planet, programmed with all of the knowledge of our whole species over all of its history …even that computer could not make such a calculation about the future because that is impossible. The most recent edge of science, that’s quantum theory, says reality unfolds within certain probabilities. But there are no certainties. Future events can’t be predicted. Or at least not exactly. Only at various levels of probability. It’s important to get that.

A: So it's our cultural codes that are varying and producing different cultures and then the fitter cultures survive better? Is that what you're saying? 

G: That's right. We stopped evolving genetically long ago. Cultural evolution is a better way to evolve. It's nimble. It responds to changes in the ecosystem faster. And those changes always come. Quantum uncertainty insures that they have to.  

W: Hey, wait a minute! That brings us to that second principle of reality you said affects how we make up our values and cultural codes. Isn’t that what you were saying when Josh was here?

G: Well re-called, young polemicist.

W: You’re going to call a halt here, aren’t you? I can feel it.

G: What you got today is enough to absorb for a while. Let’s make lunch. And no beer for Lochlann. Don’t even ask. His mother would burn me at the stake if he started drinking beer in my home.

A: You can be infuriating. We’d like to get to the end of this plot line, you know.

G: Indeed, I do. But it’s time for lunch. Aren’t you hungry?

A: And thirsty.