"And if it's not stable then it moves until it arrives somewhere stable, only how is it moving, here? With national politics the way it moves is that other countries deliberately counterbalance ones that are growing. With wars, the way it moves is that the side that's more powerful wins. But with babies, it's not that some people throw all girls and some people throw all boys, where one would increase its numbers until it didn't have an advantage. Instead everybody throws a mix. ...that's just a confusion without even a theory."

How they manage to know one thing around here, but not another... probably the concept of an equilibrium appeared in wizardry, even though, apparently, wizards don't already know calculus??  At least at their level?

"Right.  Any time you've got pressures on something, moving it, it'll keep moving for so long as the pressures aren't balanced.  Half male and half female represents a balance of something, which is why it's like that - but what is it that's balancing?  We have thoughts like 'well, if it was ten times as many women as men, or ten times as many men as women, then a women who had all male children or all female children would have more grandchildren'.  But that doesn't explain how it's a pressure - how it would be able to move the system's mix of men and women, if that mix wasn't already one-to-one.  How can we get from 'in a country with ten times as many women as men, one woman with all male children would have ten times as many grandchildren', to, 'there is a pressure that will move the average ratio of men and women if it isn't already 1:1'?"

This takes them a while! They're more willing to show confusion on their faces, at least. 

Eventually: "well, say you throw only daughters, and those daughters also throw only daughters, and some other people throw only sons, who also throw only sons - no, that doesn't work, because they'd have to have children with each other -"

"No, I think you're onto something," Meritxell says. "I mean, not in the case where some people only throw sons and some only throw daughters, but in the case where some people mostly throw sons and some mostly throw daughters, and pass that along, then if you start out with mostly women, the people who mostly throw sons will have more grandchildren until there's not more women anymore, and they haven't got an advantage. Uh, I'm confused about, how you'd pass along a tendency to throw sons. I'm not sure you can do that."

"You're on the right track.  Remember some things I told you earlier, about tiny spirals inside people; remember that those hidden orders are real and not just stories, or at least they were definitely real in dath ilan, and probably also here given that the food hasn't already killed me.  Inside every human body, there are tiny spirals that code how a body works, themselves divided into twenty-three pairs of packages.  One of those package-pairs is the sex package-pair, or chromosome pair in Baseline..."

Keltham sketches out the sex chromosomes, XY for male, XX for female.  A child gets one chromosome in each chromosome-pair from each parent, allocated by the parent at random.

"But if you imagine a new genetic-alternative, mutation, which influenced the ratio of sperm containing Y chromosomes or X chromosomes - or a mutation in the mother, which influenced whether male or female pre-infants were kept and gestated - that mutation wouldn't have to be a mutation in the sex chromosomes in particular.  A man could have sons that were more likely, though not certain, to have more other sons, and even the daughters of those men might still have male children of their own that had more sons.  The force of possible heritable mutations that would throw a different mix is the pressure that only ever reaches a balancing point at one-to-one males to females."

"Or rather, to be precise, the balance is one-to-one parental investment in males and females.  If females were half the size of men and required half as much parental attention and grew two to a birth, so that you could raise two females at the same cost as one male, the balancing point would be two women per men; you wouldn't be able to do better by birthing more men because men would be more expensive.  If you see an animal species that isn't half male and half female, the first thing to ask is whether the males or females are bigger or smaller or fewer survive to adulthood or there's otherwise some big difference in how expensive they are to birth and raise to maturity."

"But there's a larger point and a more important one.  The balancing point isn't the point that's good for the species, the country, as a whole.  It's not the point you would pick if you were a supergod making the species from scratch.  If you were doing that as a supergod, you'd probably have ten times as many women as men, and then just make it incredibly biologically difficult to ever birth all men - try to design the people so that no mutation could possibly affect the balance of ten women per men.  More members of the species would be able to birth children.  Or to look at it from another angle, you might also wonder whether a group or small faction birthing mostly women, would have an advantage over a group with half men and half women - if the mostly-female group could grow faster, because more of its members could bear children, or because it didn't have to pay the extra cost in food of supporting men too.  But then a group like that would also be vulnerable to an invading mutation that birthed more men; that mutation would rapidly spread within the group.  You can look at the sex ratio in humans, half men and half women, and say things like, 'Oh, I see that the balancing points between competing genes do not settle at the place that is good for groups having more children, it settles in the places that are advantageous for individuals having more children.'"

"And then everything else you see inside a human should settle in a similar kind of place, or it won't be stable against the pressure from mutated alternatives.  That's why you want to prosper for yourself, instead of being full of unselfish desire to see your whole country prosper.  It's why I need to offer you money to work for me, instead of you just working for the benefit of Golarion or Cheliax.  A faction full of individuals all working for the common good would grow faster, obtain more resources and have more kids, and you might think a mutation which built people like that would soon take over the world.  But as soon as that faction was invaded by a mutation in an individual that worked for their own benefit, that mutation would soon become more common; it wouldn't be a stable balancing point in the sort of species that ends up with half males and half females.  Insect species, like ants if you have those here, which you probably do if there's a word for ants, have lots of worker ants all laboring for the benefit of an ant hive; they don't have equal investment in males and females.  Ants can be balanced in different places because ants reproduce differently and workers share more genes with their queens."

"I wouldn't be surprised if the event that you remember historically as humans gaining free will, was the gods trying to modify people to work unselfishly for gods or maybe the gods' factions, like ants; but over time mutations accumulated in the human population that made them resistant to that magical template, and restored the old balancing points, where people cared about themselves instead.  Or maybe the gods stopped doing it for some other reason, I don't know, I'm new around here.  Oh, and I should say, the balancing points aren't purely selfish.  You share half your genes with your parents, half your genes with your children, and an average of around half your genes with your brothers and sisters; you have some instinct to help them, though not quite as strongly as you wish to help yourself.  My point is that, if you know how all the pieces of reality are woven together, if you know the hidden orders and secret stories behind them, you can take one glance at the statistics of women giving birth, see that it's half male children and half female children, and guess, 'I bet the people in this species mostly want pay for their work, and don't mostly work unselfishly for the good of the group like ants; I bet they care a lot about their brothers and sisters, but not nearly so much about their second cousins.  The pressures-on-heredity in this species must balance at the point where individuals and small families can't easily get more grandchildren with a different strategy, not at the point where larger groups can't get more grandchildren with a different strategy.'  And I could similarly guess very quickly that you hadn't been put together from scratch by gods or supergods, just from the way you acted so similar to dath ilani at a basic level, because gods wouldn't be bound by those balancing points the same way."

"I should probably pause here and check whether you have any questions, whether you followed all that, and whether I'm currently committing any visible horrible teaching errors that make a Chelish student's life less pleasant."

The students are captivated.

"It fits with what we've learned in theology class," Meritxell says. "About there being deep reasons Evil is - a natural equilibrium, though not usually phrased like that -"

"A balancing point of pressures.  Very large amounts of reality in general are at balancing points of pressures, which is why that aspect of reality sticks around in that form; it's a very common, maybe the most common form that a hidden order takes.  Water is a balancing point of pressures, in a way I'll either explain for free or sell later; if water wasn't balanced in its own dimensions of reality, you wouldn't see so much of it around.  Rocks too, they're at balancing points among the possible ways that the stuff making up rocks could be instead of rocks.  Likewise, just about everything in the human body or mind is at a local balancing point of how individuals and families can have the most grandchildren, because if it wasn't, even a small mutation could move you to a better point along that local dimension, and then that mutation would propagate.  Like people wanting to have sex, say, where if they wanted less sex, they'd have fewer kids, and if they wanted even more sex right away, they'd do things that aren't productive in the long term and end up with fewer kids.  If your body made a bunch more blood or a bunch less blood, that would, on average, lead to you having fewer kids too.  The degree to which people are Evil on average, however gods define that exactly, will also be at a balancing point relative to how many grandchildren families have when they're around that Evil - or if the world has recently been thrown into disequilibrium, the average degree of Evil will be moving away from its previous point where people in the previous world had the most grandchildren if they were around that Evil.  This would be even easier to see if you'd studied calculus, by the way, so when you do, remember to go back and rethink this in terms of derivatives equaling zero at the point where things stick around in existence."

They take notes vigorously. 

"Spells you can cast happen at balancing points in ways that magic can be," someone volunteers. "If you try to design a spell that does a random thing you thought of that'd be nice to have a spell for, it'll blow up in your face, and the reason is that you didn't happen to stumble on a way for magic to be where the magic will be happy to be, with no nearby state it'll flow into instead. So the way to actually invent spells is to understand where magic flows, and then find places it's flowed into, and then figure out what spell that must be."

"I'm frankly a bit puzzled as to why wizards don't already know calculus and not just topology.  But maybe if spell design is hard enough to require specialized ultra-expensive intelligence headbands and calculus is only useful once you get to that part... well, that's a topic for another time."  Keltham is going to be so amused if the actual key to spell design is on the order of 'invert the matrix to solve for the balancing point' and they just don't know how to invert matrices, but he is mostly not expecting this to be the case, though the incredibly bad design of Chelish schools sure has bumped up its plausibility.

"Anyways, uh, now that I've said all that, and just to check, has anyone had a sudden horrible realization about how mutations for lower Intelligence would be propagating, or why only what this world calls 'average intelligence' is the way for a family to have the most grandchildren, or why the Chelish heritage-optimization program is doing something horribly wrong around there?  I don't have anything specific in mind, here, I just, uh, it seems wise to check."

"Well, probably we should be encouraging wizards more aggressively?"

"Maybe it'd make sense to not let stupid people have children?"

"Wizards are also more likely to die, I think - and we're in school for longer, and deployed when we graduate - I don't see how you'd change that though, you need all that school to get good and you need the deployment to pay Cheliax back and keep the Worldwound sealed -"

"You could encourage wizards to have kids before they deploy, and their grandparents and the daycares raise them while they're deployed. I think it's hard to be pregnant in school right now but if it was good for Cheliax they could change the things that make it hard."

"There's - well, there's specific details I should probably be selling, not just giving away.  But, in general, I'll observe that one corollary of this whole theory is that if you've got a really excellent female wizard, and she's got a brother, you can potentially subsidize the brother to have an extra six kids.  It's not as good as her having an extra six kids herself, but it beats doing nothing.  Anything more clever and optimal and calculated than that is probably a sale issue rather than a free giveaway, though I'm still working out which is which on that score."

"I don't know enough details about Cheliax's situation to know myself what an optimal policy should look like.  I've given you some of the knowledge you'd need to think about it, but if Chelish governance is considering a policy shift based on that knowledge, it is probably wise to run it past me too.  I don't know how to balance the intelligence of future generations against any need for immediate wizards being deployed at the Worldwound, and yeah, asking people to be pregnant in school is a large ask.  But if you are currently losing even more intelligence to that sort of leak in the gene pool, I would really seriously consider that an emergency, I would not personally have expected a stable society to be possible at this level of average intelligence and I'm not sure how much further it stays possible."

His audience is so captivated and concerned. 

You'd think raising kids in Cheliax would be sufficient to make them not stunningly naive but apparently it isn't, Elias Abarco mutters through the telepathic bond with his colleagues. The girls are hanging off Keltham's every word with a degree of conviction that they ought to realize is borderline dangerous - at best trying to figure out how everything else they've been told is compatible with what they're hearing now, instead of keeping in mind that maybe Keltham's just not Asmodean and won't teach them to be either. Or they're very good liars. Probably for at least some of them, it's the latter - though it's a very good presentation, optimized for Elias rather than for Keltham, who is definitely missing nearly all of its nuances. 

Keltham won't teach them to be Asmodean. That's obvious. Presumably part of what they're here for is to figure out whether there's a variant of Keltham's teachings that will teach kids to be Asmodean, the obvious intelligence and societal competence distilled differently, presented in a way that preserves the awe-inducing sense of 'that's what it's like, for the world to be designed around principles that you'd have to be much smarter to even begin to understand' while also preserving the stuff that'd ideally go with it - a sense of smallness and irrelevance which dath ilan clearly does not bother inculcating...

Maybe some of the girls can be set to coming up with the synthesis, once they've been nailed down. The plan is to get them tomorrow before dawn, possibly excluding Sevar who might spend the night with Keltham and, if so, can be got at breakfast. This isn't Asmodeanism but it does seem like there's a better-crafted, more compelling version of Asmodeanism buried in it, once you strip out the stuff that's plainly aimed at advancing the art rather than awing children into submission with it.

Ione Sala, if somebody were to look inside her head - which nobody of Chelish affiliation, at least, is doing exactly at this moment - would not be smiling as much on the inside as she is on the outside.  She is thinking about how it really is beautiful that you could look at a species of half men and half women, and deduce so many other things from that, because you know why they're half men and half women, which is a huge thought she only understands a fraction of, but it implies so many other things, apparently.  And with that, you can just get tossed into another plane, even though nobody from your home plane knew for sure there were other planes, and by the time you've been there two minutes, you know which parts of the theology lessons are more there because they're mandatory for Asmodeans to believe and which parts are, the other kind of theology, it doesn't do to be too precise about thoughts like that.  But you can end up in another plane you had no idea existed, and within two minutes you know the people there weren't originally created by the gods.

Ione Sala isn't smiling as much on the inside because she's regretting, a little, that her life is like it is.  She does well on tests, it's why she's here, that and being passably pretty.  She carefully doesn't compete too hard in social contests, she aims to end up safely in the middle.  She behaves just as it is safest to behave, towards the students above her and below her, including sexual favors as they are given away to those below her who are useful, or extracted from her by those above her.  She passes her loyalty scans by being a cautiously obedient game-player even in her own mind, a sort of person that Cheliax considers adequately standard and predictable, a sort of soul that Asmodeus considers to be an acceptably tyrannized slave.  It is the way that things have always been and will always be.  If any parts of her feel otherwise, they are not allowed to voice their heretical thoughts in words; though she also knows, wordlessly in the back of her mind, that if she's a good-enough wizard someday Cheliax will ask her to sell her soul and after that it will be okay to think more freely.

Still some tiny remaining fraction of Ione Sala, even today, wishes without words or inner acknowledgment that her life could be more like the greater reality she's dimly glimpsed inside a repurposed library in an Archduke's villa: learning things, knowing how one fact connects to so many other facts, seeing how worlds differ across planes.

But now, onward to the next part of this topic, which may be personally important to some of those present.  Suppose hypothetically that Cheliax discovers an alien visitor, who we'll guess for now to be capable of interbreeding with Golarion humans, who is about as smart as the smartest Chelish people without intelligence headbands... actually, can somebody remind Keltham of what the mean intelligence is around here, in the local measurements?  He thinks he was told this number but he's forgotten it since.  Also does this language have any more standard way to talk about the square root of the average squared deviation from the mean?

Ten, and no, that's how you'd talk about that, though with intelligence in particular people usually talk about a two-step, which is the same thing - an intelligence of 12.

"So around sixty-eight percent of the population should have an Intelligence between 8 and 12?  Is that about correct?"

Yep! 

All right then, the Chelish government has just come across an alien visitor with an Intelligence of... Keltham thinks he was told 18, though at levels like these, the difference between 17.5 and 18.5 is significant, but let's say his Intelligence is exactly 18 for now.  Though it feels funny to call himself "Intelligence 18", since in dath ilan's system, the average g is 0 and Keltham is at +0.8.  Somebody with a dath ilani g of 18 would have a dath ilani Intelligence of "46".  But let's ignore for now how the dath ilani system is obviously better and closer to the underlying math.

So anyways:  Is this alien visitor likely to be of any special benefit to heredity-optimization in Cheliax and Golarion, compared with just matching the same potential volunteers with a local man of Intelligence 18?  Is he worth anything special from the Chelish government's standpoint?

Pretend you were just collectively tapped to advise the Chelish government on this, and can't ask Keltham directly!  Also try to pretend that you're a dath ilani whose life experience trains them to continue thinking in the face of questions your teachers didn't tell you how to answer, including the part where you know and list the reasons you might be wrong.

....well, probably it's easier to get girls to sleep with Keltham, since he's cooler than their average male classmate. If that's wrong, it's wrong because, well, you could just order them - you could just pay them more.

"So," says Tonia, "if someone reads 18 and their relatives also read 18, they're more valuable than someone who reads 18 and their relatives are more like 14, because the score doesn't map perfectly to the thing we actually care about - though it's pretty good - and someone who is an outlier is also likelier to be, sort of, a measurement error - a case where they're not actually quite as bright as their number suggests - but if their family's that smart too then they probably just are -"

"And similarly if someone's from a society where the average is 18," Asmodia says. "It's a realer 18, in a manner of speaking. ...uh, if that's wrong, it'd be because...maybe the measurement system is actually meant to evaluate locals and fails on evaluating foreigners -"

"dath ilan is richer than us. Everyone eats better. We know that kids who don't eat enough are stupider. Maybe none of us eat enough, and we're all stupider than our children would be if they were raised in dath ilan, and so Keltham has less good heritable-traits than us, but a much better upbringing."

"Sure, but wizard kids are mostly born to wizards, and don't go hungry."

"We don't go hungry compared to normal people, we might still be missing something - or replace 'hunger' with 'malaria' - does dath ilan have malaria -"

"Doesn't translate, so if it's there it's not common enough to have a name I learned, either that or this translation magic is picky about what it translates in ways I don't understand.  I... know the theory of several things that will knock half a... will knock a point off of Intelligence if you're deficient on them, that's specific knowledge rather than basic general principles but the Chelish government should maybe purchase that knowledge from me sometime soon.  I'm happy to sell it on a contingency contract where it's only worth any payment if you run experiments and find later that kids were actually deficient."  Element-53 is in seaweed.  They need to see what happens if kids here grow up eating seaweed.

"Also, credit for thinking of that at all, I should have remembered earlier that intelligence here may not be as heritable as it is where I come from because we've eliminated the variation from non-heritable factors like that.  There are also potential contaminants that can knock off a point of Intelligence or do other kinds of metabolic damage."  Element-82.  Element-3.  "You should contingency-buy my knowledge about that, too.  Or would healing spells fix that already?"

"That's not the kind of thing that healing fixes. Restoration might but your average person who isn't an adventurer has never gotten a Restoration, it costs, uh, three or four years of unskilled labor."