Einstein's Amygdala Part Two: Creating Popular Regulations

So all of the wild baby rabbits lasted 5 days, seemingly content to feed on pieces of bread soaked in milk and eggs.  Then they got sluggish. Then they suddenly seemed wide awake and active, and we kids were elated. This is what some animals do just before they die. We buried the baby cottontail rabbits in the woods. My mom, raised on a farm, said it was par for the course.

So from a child's perspective, our amygdalas had been yanked around, rewarded and punished, over 5 days falling in love with wild baby rabbits that your mom says probably won't survive the initial cat bite.

Deceased. late, extinguished, Monty Python "no more" baby rabbits is a headline we don't like, so it's easy to write a story... to imagine a reporter covers our dead bunnies, and the press demands a solution.

So what lessons would we expect innocent, naive, emotional children to learn? If they were in charge of regulating cats and rabbits, what rules might the children create which an experienced, educated, creative, thoughtful, highly intelligent person would not? Even though the Einstein does have an amygdala, we imagine that the higher power of intelligence would design a better rule - or not try to design one - rather than let emotional bunny-centric kids rule the roost.

Or what if the Rabbits were Super Intelligent, and could Propose Their Own Rules?

Bugs Bunny Square Dance from Loony Toons "Hillbilly Hare" (set in my home state of Arkansas)

The point is to see how a traumatic or exciting or disappointing experience in a person's amygdala can suggest that regulation is necessary, and an improvement in the world can result.

1. Ban cats

2. Create a superbreed of invisible rabbits

These might be the ideas of the youngest child. But for me, it was more like

1. Don't let my cat outside except in the broad daylight, to reduce risk

2. If my cat returns with a bunny in its mouth, shut the doors and don't let her go back for more.

3. Don't let yourself get attached to wild younglings which have had cat teeth subdermal exposure.

But these are wishy washy, more "guidance" than a legit appeal to the reduction of cottontail rabbit litter attacks. 

Perhaps, the original Post 1 contains the best advice - rabbits evolved to be food (they reproduce at a rate fatal to the population if owls, foxes, bobcats etc. fail to eat them), and perhaps they will evolve to produce ever faster if there are more cats.

But perhaps we are watching a slow motion mass-extinction.

The main takeaway is this: I have not nearly begun to create the exhaustion-level argument that human society is capable of having on any topic that upsets our amygdalas. But here's what Einstein does with his.

Our human, cat, and rabbit amygdalas evolved over hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years. For 99.999% of that time, the risk of bad things killing us was very high. Until a mere 200 years ago, a blip on the screen of evolution, there were hundreds of things likely to kill us, important to be afraid of and react quickly and skeptically of.

Today, in most of the world, the highest risks to our health are affluence-related.

Over-eating. Driving cars too fast. Ingesting newly developed drugs. New inventions like handguns. But as compared to the highest risk of death a mere fractional 200 years ago, the biggest risk today is having lived twice as long as the average human 1% of evolution ago. The entire list of these affluence-related risks and outside risks today is a lower risk than faced by 30 year olds, centuries (seconds in evolution relativity) ago.

Einstein's theory of relativity places the fully formed amygdala in a perspective setting, similar to the relative speeds of sounds from trains, speed of light, all the great Einstein thought experiments explaining relativity. 

Being worried about making the right rules to protect rabbits is in part due to an awareness of the most important thing on earth, to me - staving off mass extinction, or any extinction. But baby cottontail rabbits and PETA advocates will, if we allow ourselves, become distractions. There are a finite number of rules and regulations we can enforce. And EPA at least is very bad at sunsetting any regulation - state regulatory agencies created recycling divisions (like th eone I led) 30 years ago because no city had convenient curbside recycling. But 30 years later, when recycling is as ubiquitous as laundrymats, "Zero (tolerance of) Waste" promises to maintain every rule and expand them ever futher.

My job is to keep regulations lean and effective. More regulations created with a finite amount of enforcement will prioritize low risk baby bunnies over the orangutan, which is threatened by palm oil plantations - our affluence-related love of margarine. 

So the Einstein answer to the hypothetical childrens rabbit regulation is that your amygdala reacts to local stimulus, and even if well intended and virtuous, adds noise to the system if rabbits and cats are not a threatened species.

Threats are relative. Enstein's amygdala can be kept in perspective to the cerebral cortex. Passionate caring can be like leaving a firehose on 24/7 to mitigate fires.

So the argument for conservation of enforcement is a quote from The Watchmen (2009).

It doesn't take a genius to see the world has problems.

Yeah, but it would take a whole roomfull of Morons to think that you can solve them.