Strategic Resources
There lived a mathematician named Pierre François Verhulst at the beginning of the 19th century. He did all sorts of boring things, including creating the Verhulst equation of population dynamics.
It looks like this in its original state:
Here P is the current population size, K is its maximum size (it actually depends on the amount of resources), and r is the growth rate. The general idea is that the closer a population size is to its maximum, the slower it grows. Or it even decreases altogether if there are not enough resources for everyone. It was the wonderful letters K and r that began to be used in the 20th century to designate the two main types of population strategies existing on the planet. These terms were first introduced in 1967 by American ecologists Robert MacArthur and Edward Wilson, but this has no significance, because even without them, biologists have long worked with the Verhulst equation.
Who are r-strategists and K-strategists?
Blue aura - what does it mean?
The blue aura corresponds to the color of the Ajna chakra. In ancient cultures it was associated with infinity and the dreaminess it can bring. We all think about the eternal when we look at the endless night sky. This sight awakens our imagination. The blue color speaks of a longing for the wonderful, the extraordinary. A person with such a halo lacks something transcendental. Often such people are introverts to the extreme. It is difficult for them to make contact if they are surrounded by a rich, blue glow.
A person's blue aura speaks of the tenderness that a person feels towards others. He takes life seriously, looks to the future directly and confidently. Pure, blue light speaks of a selfless character who can sacrifice much on the altar of the happiness of others. We can say that they are talented altruists. Altruists from God. Because all this daydreaming often leads people with a blue halo to the path of searching for God.
They have well-developed intuition. She often suggests the right path in the intricacies of life. They do not crave compliments, do not feel the need for them. It is enough for them to simply be loved. But their biggest disadvantage is that they live in the past, rarely looking to the future. Especially if they are caught up in some old problem or unhealed wound. They can get out of such a situation on their own, or with the help of loved ones. And if not, then they will be forever doomed to return in thought to mistakes made long ago.
They prefer to do things alone. There is no hostility in this action - it’s just more comfortable for them. They are obligatory and sublime, but at the same time, when working in a company, they can get lost, which will only interfere with their work. That's all, because people with a blue aura have the most common type of temperament - melancholic. He needs peace and quiet.
R-strategists
The motto of r-strategists is “Multiply with all your might!”
There is space, food, light, warmth - it doesn’t matter. It is important to copy yourself as quickly and intensively as possible. r-strategists include most bacteria, many plants and fungi, some species of insects and fish, and a very limited number of mammals. An R-strategist is easy to recognize by the following characteristic features: he is most often of medium size, lives very briefly, reaches sexual maturity very quickly, his offspring number in the hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, and the r-strategist is not involved in raising them and they die at a catastrophic speed .
And - great news for Deputy Mizulina and Mr. Milonov: those r-strategists who use sexual reproduction are practically not noticed in homosexuality. Well, maybe by mistake...
R-strategists are indispensable when you need to quickly populate an empty territory
: a freshly opened carton of milk, an island that survived a volcanic eruption, or, for example, a planet that has acquired water and at least the slightest conditions for the survival of amino acids.
But the rate of reproduction of r-strategists also has its drawbacks.
For example, the habit of gobbling up any food that their mandibles and pseudopodia can reach. So it usually goes something like this. At first there were two r-strategists. Then there were two million two hundred and twenty-two r-strategists. Then - two hundred and twenty-two gigabillion million r-strategists. And then riders on colorful horses arrived, and the population, combed by Famine, Pestilence and War, was reduced again to two half-dead r-strategists.
Officially, this sad story is called “population explosion - collapse - stabilization.” And evolutionarily it’s not that it’s been very successful, at least for animals larger than a button. Therefore, most animals and plants larger than a button on this planet follow a different strategy - K.
"Blue eyes"
Hélène Hammar becomes campaign chief of staff when her predecessor, Sara Farzin, goes on sick leave. At least that's what management says. But when the heroine cannot reach Sarah and then finds her phone in her office, she begins to realize that management is hiding something. After a while, the police find Sarah's empty car, but the woman is nowhere to be found... Helen decides to get to the truth by any means and find out the secret that is being hidden from her. But will she be able to get out of this web alive?
Watch Blue Eyes for free on ShowJet:
K-strategists
The K-strategy is designed to ensure that the population always maintains its optimal size, close to the maximum. Now, if four krakozyabrs can feed on this clearing, then four krakozyabrs will live on it, no more, no less. It is reasonable, convenient and harmonious.
Therefore, K-strategists (which are almost all mammals, almost all birds, as well as some plants, fish and insects) reproduce only when they have the resources for this. And they sharply reduce childbearing if the population counter begins to crackle alarmingly.
Zoo workers know that many animals are very difficult to reproduce in captivity. Animals do not like the lack of space, excessive fuss around, improper lighting, unbalanced nutrition, noise and one hundred and fifty other parameters of their existence. Even if conception has taken place, it is not a fact that the mother will not miscarry the fetus. And if he carries it to the end, he will not necessarily feed the offspring; there is even a risk that she will eat it altogether. Therefore, a pregnant hippopotamus or wombat is separated from the rest of the hippopotamuses or wombats, her cage is fenced off with soundproof, opaque shields, and she is walked around on tiptoe without breathing. All so that the hippopotamus or wombat feels the peace around her and her inescapable loneliness, and her population counter graciously gives the go-ahead for raising offspring.
K-strategists who do not listen to the voice of the counter instantly fall out of the evolutionary race. The few young K-strategists require a very long and difficult cultivation, a lot of free time and resources. And if the parents produced offspring at the wrong time and in the wrong place, then they will waste time and effort, because the cubs will not survive anyway. So it’s wiser not to rush, but to wait for the right moment for such a risky adventure as childbearing. And this policy gives K-strategists an evolutionary advantage. What's interesting is that simply having plenty of food doesn't make the counter shut up. K-strategists know that eating a lot and reproducing uncontrollably is dangerous. So a much more important indicator is free space and not too many representatives of your species (as well as other species with a similar lifestyle) around you.
How do K-strategists combat population pressure? They have many tools for this. Here are the five most popular:
Why do K-strategists often not limit themselves to refusing sex during overpopulation, but use all of the above tools? We'll find out now.
Inextinguishable thirst for sex
All males and many females of K-strategy species are bisexual.
And they are not only bisexual, but also capable of sometimes directing their sexual interest to the most inappropriate objects. All this is due to evolution. The fact is that the sexual instinct in higher animals is a very powerful thing, for which a considerable part of the body’s biochemistry works. This complex apparatus usually cannot stand idle.
Species with a K-strategy have learned to deceive him using all sorts of tricks: for example, masturbation, sex with inanimate objects, sex with inappropriate partners. Of course, most often these tricks have to be used in the absence of a suitable partner. A parrot raping its owner's ear, or a cat passionately hugging a rag, would willingly direct its gaze towards the charming females of its species. In the same way, sailors, prisoners and monks caught in the sin of Sodom usually have the most normal of orientations. “Essentially, this is not homosexual behavior in the strict sense of the word,” wrote Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor E. N. Panov in his work “Anatomy of Same-Sex Sex,” “but simply the male’s reaction to a certain surrogate sexual partner, since the female is in real moment no access. And even inanimate objects can act as such a surrogate.” So bisexuality is an on/off mechanism.
But, importantly, the higher the population pressure, the more often the K-strategy will keep this mechanism turned on. Until the emergence of pure homosexuals, in whom the sexual initiative of a representative of the other sex evokes a pronounced reaction of disgust.
Interestingly, judging by some experiments with rodents*, such strict homosexuality most often develops in the embryonic state - when the female mother is kept in unsuitable conditions, for example, when the cell is overcrowded.
Goat-footed and dog-headed: bestial devil
At the beginning of the 11th century, the image of Satan in European culture changed dramatically and began to vary quite widely. For example, in the Barberini Psalter, created around 1050, in the same scene of Christ healing the possessed, there are not only demons flying out of the man’s mouth, but also Satan himself, defeated and bound by the Savior.
This is a half-naked zooanthropomorphic creature with a red body, gray hair, a bald head and a snout resembling a dog.
In an English manuscript of the 11th century, the devil appears in a completely different guise: he is depicted as a giant with a hairy back (in the texts of that time his fur was compared to tongues of flame) and disheveled hair, without a single bestial feature. But it’s not so easy to discern something human in the figure of Satan from the Spanish commentary on the Apocalypse (11th century) - the character’s legs and arms are equipped with sharply sharpened claws and look more like the paws of an animal, a short tail sticks out from his butt, and his nose resembles a beak. The last detail is by no means accidental - at that time Jews were depicted as ugly and big-nosed, and, most likely, the author intended to draw this visual parallel. Black, grey, brown, blue or violet, Satan with his colors of night and disease opposed the red or white angels embodying heavenly fire and the light of God.
In the same century, some devils began to develop horns. Tiny at first, they later become the dominant feature of the image. Together with claws, animal ears and paws, a tail, and from the 12th century also bat wings instead of angelic ones, these details formed the appearance of the devil throughout the Middle Ages. The “bestialization” of Satan seems completely logical: how else could artists depict the base essence of the enemy of the human race who fell from heaven?
Horned, tailed, goat-footed and hairy, the devil sometimes resembled the ancient god Pan to such an extent that some researchers talk about the continuity of images (while others believe that Satan “descended” from satyrs, jester-athletes and the winged Eros in Greek vase paintings). And they explain it this way: in Antiquity, when a new faith was just beginning to spread throughout the Roman Empire, evil began to be associated with the old, pagan pantheon. Christian theologians never tired of repeating that by worshiping the statues of traditional Roman celestial beings, people were paying homage to Satan himself. Those of them whose cult was associated with dissolute rituals were especially denounced - for example, Pan, who stood out from the rest with his indecent behavior and bestial appearance, and therefore became a symbol of the evil that Roman polytheism allegedly concealed within itself.
However, in reality, we do not find a single image of Satan similar to Pan created before the 11th century, when ancient pagan iconography was already forgotten. Probably, medieval miniaturists painted horns and hooves not because they were trying to copy the image of a goat-footed god, but because of the texts that were circulating in their time, where the most selective epithets and animal comparisons were used in describing the devil.
These prose and poetic apocrypha told in detail about all stages of Satan’s life - from the establishment of his own throne “in the north of heaven” and subsequent casting into hell to his confrontation with Christ in the desert.
The pan-shaped devil in the miniature from the famous Psalter of Queen Ingeborg invites the 6th century saint Theophilus of Cilicia to enter into a deal with him. He agrees, and they conclude a special pact (today historians actually find agreements with Satan in the archives, written in blood). Later, having repented, Theophilus begs forgiveness from the Mother of God, who breaks the contract.
The episode of the fall of angels aroused particular interest among theologians and representatives of art. The learned abbot Elfric the Grammar, who lived in the 10th century, suggested that the Lord created not nine, but ten ranks of these creatures - and one of them was precisely the very army of Satan, which, because of its pride, betrayed the Creator. After which the artists began to draw one more “shelf” in the heavens, depicting the Lord’s throne: the topmost one remained empty in memory of the rebel apostates cast into the abyss of darkness.
Often miniaturists tried to show the transformation of the bodies of fallen angels. Therefore, in the images where Satan’s army is thrown into hell, the demons who have just begun their sorrowful path are absolutely identical to the former comrades who throw them down. Those that have already fallen from the sky grow horns, animal ears or clawed paws right in the air. And those who find themselves in the abyss have a more familiar appearance: black, unsightly, bestial-like creatures.
In the 12th century, Satan begins to mutate for the first time. One of the works of the medieval intellectual Hildegard of Bingen describes her “vision of the Church as the Bride of the Son of God.”
The devil crawls out of the vulva of a woman (personification of the Church) standing in a position of prayer.
From above she exudes a heavenly radiance, there is a crown on her head, and a rich robe on her body. But there are bruises on the legs, indicating the suffering of the believers. A devil with red eyes and sharp teeth protrudes from the vulva. The fallen angel Lucifer says: “My dominion will come from the womb of Woman,” referring to the Church. Thus the devil blasphemously imitates the Son of God. Having gained strength, he encroaches on the power of the Lord Himself and is defeated. This image anticipates the many faces that will grow on the body of Satan and his assistants, which will appear three centuries later.
People are like animals
Now let's turn strictly to human society, to which we still seem to belong, although not without cuts. Of course, man is an animal (a person who believes that this is not so is a stupid animal). And, accordingly, all these evolutionary mechanisms are inevitably built into us, no matter how much we pretend that our powerful intellect and our sublime soul are capable of suppressing the base nature of our flesh.
Therefore, we strictly adhere to the K-strategy. In ancient times, in case of overpopulation, we killed excess offspring by sacrificing children or dooming infants to death as a result of deliberate neglect (according to the founder of psychohistory Lloyd Demos, author of the book “Psychology of Childhood”, throughout our history, on average, two children out of every three who did not live to adulthood were victims of murder by their parents). In a more civilized era, we perform abortions, use contraception, encourage the institutions of monasticism and ancient maidenhood, impose strict restrictions on those wishing to become parents in overpopulated areas (yes, juvenile justice works much more not for the benefit of children, but to reduce their number, so that there , where ten grimy children with broken knees used to run around, one carefully washed child in a bicycle helmet was walking decorously under the supervision of two frightened adults). And yes, homosexuality also works effectively in favor of the K-strategy.
Bare Loins: Romantic Devil
The evolution of the devil ended the same way it began. After the publication of the English writer John Milton’s poem “Paradise Lost” in 1667, which detailed the history of the confrontation between Satan and God, the image of the evil spirit began to be romanticized. He is again beginning to be depicted as an angel, usually a muscular and extremely pleasant man, without any elements of the grotesque. This is no longer a hybrid or a monster. True, a characteristic detail - horns or wings - sometimes still reveals the devil in the handsome man.
One of the sexiest images of Satan was created in 1842 by the Belgian sculptor Joseph Gefs for the Cathedral in Liege. His “Genius of Evil” was a naked young man with bat wings.
The devil turned out to be so beautiful that the local bishop asked to remove the statue from the church. The newspapers trumpeted that such a Satan could distract young girls from prayer and preaching.
In 1848, Joseph Gefs's brother Guillaume made another image of the lord of the underworld - it was supposed to replace the too beautiful statue in the Liege Cathedral. His Satan is crying, a bitten apple is depicted instead of a serpent, the character is more muscular and not so young, and the demon’s loins are hidden under a veil - so as not to embarrass the parishioners. A chain is attached to his leg, with which he is chained to the rock. If you look closely at the hair, you can see small horns. The bishop, after carefully inspecting the work, accepted the sculpture, which still adorns the Liege Cathedral.
In 1847, the French artist Alexandre Cabanel painted the painting “Fallen Angel”. On it, Satan is again depicted as a man with a luxurious body, and the traditional wings of a bat are replaced by bird wings, which brings this figure even closer to the image of a heavenly messenger.
In 1866, Gustave Doré made engravings for the work of John Milton: in them the devil is as majestic as his pious brothers, and differs from them only in the shape of his wings and color.
In 1885, the luxurious “Fallen Angel” fountain by Ricardo Belver appeared in Madrid. Prior to this, the statue received many awards and was exhibited for some time in the Prado Museum. Bellver's Devil is indecently naked, with a snake wrapped around his ankle and wrist, and bird wings protruding from his shoulders.
The German artist Franz von Stuck depicted a darker and more mysterious Satan in a painting from 1890: his wings consist of black feathers, and his eyes seem to glow from within with the flames of hell.
The devil in Sascha Schneider's painting "The Triumph of Darkness" (1896) is muscular, bearded and almost completely naked. The artist shared the ideas of naturism, whose representatives called for being in the lap of nature without clothes and sang the cult of health and physical strength in art.
Following painting, romantic tricksters appear in literature. Mephistopheles and Woland finally consolidate a new type of Satan - a demonically attractive man. So the devil, who in Antiquity was depicted as a cherub, in the Middle Ages as a beast, a pan-shaped monster or a grotesque and funny hybrid with a face on his ass, again became a majestic angel.
The curse of the metropolis
As mentioned above, any species with a K-strategy keeps its numbers at the maximum level acceptable for the given conditions. If you are a tiger, this is easy for you to do. You know that you have twenty hectares of forest, which means you can and should take care of your neighbor tigress. And if another, fatter tiger came and kicked you out, then you either look for another territory or do without sex.
In social animals, everything is somewhat more complicated. We live in large groups, we all sleep together in the same tree, we tweet at each other non-stop - and our population counter has to take into account many subtle factors. Our biological “I” sits with a bunch of technical documentation and meticulously records hundreds of different parameters. Noise level. Having personal space. The physical number of representatives of your species around you. The time you spend completely alone; a feeling of emptiness, spaciousness and freedom - how often do you experience it. And so on. So, the majority of residents of modern megacities live with an overcrowding meter that has long since reached the reddest possible mark. A resident of Moscow can intellectually understand that Russia is not the most populated country in the world and that our demographics are at odds, but standing in traffic jams every day, jostling in the subway, living in a huge building with hundreds of apartments, he feels overcrowded. Any large city inevitably has negative natural growth and lives off migrants, who also stop reproducing in the second generation. Ideology, religion and traditions do not play any role here. Muslim Tehran has a minus increase in natural population, the green suburbs of New York have a plus. In wealthy Beijing, residents effortlessly fulfill the requirements of the all-China “One Family, One Child” program, but in poor Chinese villages they give birth under the threat of harsh fines, persecution and penalties, do not register children and hide them in basements. Just as a metropolis will always be a black demographic hole, so a poor, hungry, war-ravaged, but sparsely populated village will produce growth. And in the metropolis, many homosexuals will inevitably be born, and the village will traditionally be amazed at the depraved morals of all sorts of Babylons and Romes, where men lie with men, and women with women.
