Einstein's
Enlightenment
Students of probability are often overwhelmed by the
mind- bogglingly huge numbers routinely encountered. A
classic example is the probability of a monkey typing at
a keyboard and producing a work of Shakespeare by random
chance. The probability of this happening is not zero
but it is unimaginably small because the number of
distinct ways that the 100 pages of so could be filled
up with print is so unimaginably large and no particular
way of filling them up is any more likely than any
other. If there were as many monkeys at keyboards as
there are atoms in the universe and if each monkey had
been typing ten characters a second since the beginning
of time, the probability of Shakespeare’s work being
written is still extremely close to zero. The amount of
monkeys and/or time required is inconceivably huge.
One surprising lesson is that probability spaces can be
vastly larger than any count of actually existing
things. In our Shakespearean example the probability
space is the number of possible combinations of
typographic characters in a play of the length we are
considering. If we are using a typographic set of 100
characters and the play is 100 pages long and there are
2000 characters per page there are 100200,000
possible ‘plays’. This number is inconceivably larger
than the 10040 fundamental particles
composing the universe.
If we dare to think not of the relatively trivial number
of possible combinations of the 100 typographical
characters in a play but of the number of possible
configurations of the 10040 fundamental
particles composing the universe we are agog. And yet it
is obviously true that the particles composing the
universe occupy one of those configurations. If we
could examine the path traced by the universe through
configuration space since the beginning of time we would
see that the path passed through the smallest imaginable
proportion of possible states.
We will define ‘Universal Darwinism’ as the process
whereby the universe explores design space and discovers
those designs able to persist. This definition includes
theories of evolution of universes, biological evolution
by natural selection and meme replication as special
cases. Much of evolution consists of mechanisms not
usually considered Darwinian. For instance luck or
contingency may play a large role. Stephen J. Gould has
argued that if we were to run the ‘tape’ of life’s
evolution on earth over again we would likely see a much
different outcome. By far the most severe constraints on
Universal Darwinism are imposed by the laws of nature.
Laws of physics, for example constrain physical objects
to motion along more or less continuous paths.
A deep understanding
of any scientific subject requires knowledge of how its
subject matter came to be as it is; of its history. The
history of physics, astronomy and chemistry is the
subject of cosmology. The history of biology is the
subject of evolution by natural selection and the
history of psychology, archeology and anthropology are
the subjects of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary
archeology and evolutionary anthropology. All of these
historical branches of science rely on Darwinian
mechanisms as their basic explanatory mechanism.
Together these areas provide a context for all
scientific subject matter; a framework that has come to
be known as Universal Darwinism. Universal Darwinism
thus provides a scientific explanation for all design
found in the universe and a means of answering the big
questions regarding how things came to be as they are. A
direct benefit of Universal Darwinism allowing it to
provide a key to Einstein’s Enlightenment is that an
understanding of Darwinian mechanisms provides one with
a powerful organizing tool for making sense of
scientific knowledge.
As we look back toward the Big Bang and the beginning of
time, the universe contains less complexity. No
complexity rivalling the complexity of life existed
prior to a certain time. Going further back still we
find a time when atoms were the most complex matter in
existence. Earlier yet, atoms had not been formed from
their still simpler component parts.
Evolution is the story of persistence. Many complex
configurations are explored. Only a few good designs are
able to persist and maintain an existence for a
substantial amount of time. How these few good designs
are discovered and selected is the subject of Universal
Darwinism. An exploration of the details will reveal
that evolution itself is evolving; evolution is
progressively finding more powerful methods of
discovering the goods designs.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that order and
therefore complexity will, on the whole, diminish.
Evolution uses the Second Law to trade diminished
complexity in some situations for the creation of
increased complexity in others. For instance, the
conversion of mass to energy in the sun represents,
according to the second law’s accounting rules, a huge
decrease of order that evolution has harnessed to
produce biological complexity on earth.
Building and preserving order in spite of the Second Law
is the hallmark of evolution. Evolution’s forte is the
creation of extremely unlikely complex entities that are
able to persist. Evolution has employed two broad
strategies for persisting complexity:
1.
High
energy bonding. Physical law provides four forces and a
variety of niches in which these forces can operate to
produce complexity resistant to disintegration. The
water molecule (H2O) is such an entity. The
two hydrogen atoms in this molecule have one electron
apiece that form a covalent bond with the oxygen atom’s
outer shell which is two electrons short. The strength
of this bond is sufficient to preserve the complexity of
the water molecule in most earthly environments. It may
be cycled through states of liquid, gas and solid but it
remains water as it rarely encounters an energy source
sufficiently strong to break its bonds. This strategy
for persisting complexity may be summarized as: Build it
stronger than any force in its environment and it will
last.
2.
Replication. Biological evolution supplemented high
energy bonding with replication to preserve complexity.
As long as an organism can replicate at a rate faster
than it dies and disintegrates it will persist. This
mechanism has been remarkably successful in that it has
preserved a wide variety of biological forms for over
three and a half billion years even though an individual
organism lived for only a short period. Recently
evolution has supplemented biology’s genetic replicator
with the cultural memetic replicator. Ideas that have
the ability to be copied faster than they disintegrate
form the substance of culture. The replicator strategy
for persisting complexity may be summarized as: Make
copies faster then they are destroyed and it will last.
While cosmology
usually explains the ‘evolution’ of the early universe
in terms very different from Darwinian evolution there
are recent cosmological theories predicting the
evolution of universes much like ours. Lee Smolin, a
leading cosmologist, postulates an explicitly Darwinian
process, cosmological natural selection, as responsible
for producing the current state of the physical
universe.[i]
Our universe is a Goldilock’s universe, ‘just right’ for
producing stars, complex chemistry and life. At the
foundations of the best physical theories, which
describe our universe to exquisite accuracy, are 35
arbitrary parameters supplying values for some basic
properties like the masses of fundamental particles such
as the electron and proton. These parameters are not
predicted by the theory but rather their values have to
be obtained from measurements and then be inserted into
the theory. If the values of the fundamental parameters
were only slightly different no complexity would ever
have formed in our universe. Nothing more complex than
hydrogen gas would exist; no stars, no galaxies no life.
So why are these
basic parameters of our universe so precisely tuned to
produce stars, galaxies and life? Cosmological natural
selection provides an answer to this question.[ii]
A common theme of Universal Darwinism is that
progression through design space is cumulative. This
means that once a stable, complex state is achieved it
becomes a building block in the formation of yet more
complex entities. Given our ‘just right’ universe,
protons, neutrons and electrons become the building
blocks of atoms, atoms are the building blocks of
molecules, molecules the building blocks of life.
A
second common theme is that at each level only an
extremely small subset of the possible designs is able
to have an existence for any appreciable time. An
example is provided by the few hundred stable isotopes
that compose matter.
The ‘just right’ universe predicted by cosmological
natural selection bestowed the potential for complex
matter to form. All that remained was for designed space
to be explored and the stable or persistent
configurations found. When the universe had expanded and
cooled enough to allow quarks to condense into hadrons,
the two most common hadrons were protons and neutrons.
Groups of protons and neutrons can bond together to form
atoms. Atoms are distinguished as elements by the number
of protons they contain. Each element can have many
isotopes with the requisite proton count but differing
in their neutron count. As pure possibilities in design
space there are an infinite number of isotopes. In
reality only a few hundred are able to exist. Matter
that was able to find and occupy these stable niches
survived in their stable complex forms. Matter that
explored configurations as unstable isotopes had only a
brief existence in those states before reducing again to
their component parts. Most components eventually found
a niche in stable isotopes.
The range of
molecules in existence is highly reduced from the range
of pure possibilities in design space. With life this
principle is also true. As Richard Dawkins noted
‘However many ways there may be of being alive, it is
certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead,
or rather not alive.’[iii]
These two themes of cumulative complexity and a small
subset of stable designs span the breadth of Universal
Darwinism. With the evolution of chemistry to life an
important new evolutionary principle appeared. Prior to
life, the evolution of matter into more complex forms
was due to new inherent properties of matter being
exposed by properties of a changing environment.
Evolving matter contains no variations; every atom of a
given element is precisely the same. The only variation
having evolutionary consequences was the environment of
the evolving matter. The formation of atoms occurred
only when the universe cooled to the extent where its
ambient energy level, tending to tear atoms apart,
became weaker than the strong nuclear force which binds
atomic components into atoms.
Complex organic molecules can only evolve in special
benign environments. The early planet earth provided an
extremely favourable environment for chemical evolution.
Conditions, especially temperature, were optimal for the
development of complex chemistry. Much of the planet was
covered in liquid water, an ideal medium for promoting
many chemical interactions. In less than a billion years
chemistry evolved to the level of complexity required to
support life.
This process of chemical evolution evolving greater
degrees of complexity in specialized environments
reached a new level of sophistication with the advent of
life. Life may be defined by its replication of exact
instructions for building an environment where specific,
complex chemistry will occur. That environment is a life
form. A life form achieves its chemical complexity by
providing a specific environment where an enormous
number of specific chemical reactions are many orders of
magnitude more likely to occur than in any other
environment in the universe. In this respect, life forms
are reliant on the same universal mechanism required for
complexity as pre-biological systems; an environment
where physical laws capable of producing complexity can
dominate. In fact a biological organism may be seen as a
controlled environment designed to allow only a certain
select subset of complex chemical reactions to occur.
With replication evolution takes on its full Darwinian
meaning. Replication can never be perfectly exact. As
replication is inexact, variations are introduced. A
competitive advantage is gained by those variations best
able to survive and replicate even in a constant
environment. We don’t have exactly the same complexity
persisting, we have an evolving complexity persisting.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection
explains the evolution of life forms. As he
demonstrated, biological evolution is an algorithmic
process. This means anything meeting a simple set of
conditions will evolve in a manner similar to life.
These conditions are:
1)
Reproduction; the ability to make copies and thereby
increase population size.
2)
Heredity; the ability to pass traits to copies. This is
inherent in the usual meaning of the word ‘copy’ and may
be redundant and unnecessary as a separate condition.
3)
Variation; differences in heritable traits that affect
"Fitness” or the ability to survive and reproduce
leading to differential survival. Differences in
heritable traits are inescapable. Reproduction is a form
of communication where information is encoded, copied
and reconstructed. The science of communications,
produced during the 1950s, has proven error free
communications impossible. Differences in heritable
traits are implied by reproduction. Differential
survival means that not all copies can equally well
survive, often as a result of limited resource in the
environment required to maintain the copies. Those best
able to access and harness the environmental resources
will preferentially survive and make copies.
Natural Selection is based on the differential
survivability of inherited characteristics. Each
generation inherits characteristics from their parents
and in each generation there is some random variation in
these characteristics. Some variations will bestow
greater reproductive success on their bearers than will
others. The individuals possessing adaptations or
variations bestowing greater reproductive success will
propagate more offspring, offspring tending to have
these parental characteristics as well as exhibiting
some variations of their own. In this manner each
generation tends to accumulate adaptations that bestow
reproductive success.
The Darwinian algorithm will produce evolution in any
system conforming to these three simple conditions. The
direction in which the system evolves is determined by
which variations bestow survival. In other words the
system will become better at surviving and will
accumulate adaptations that assist its survival. What
those adaptations are is hard to predict and depends
heavily on the environment in which the system is
evolving.
Adaptations are entities produced by evolution that
result in reproductive success. They achieve this result
because they contain knowledge of the world in which
they exist and how to persist in it. When we say ‘A cell
knows how to convert glucose to energy’ we are referring
to the adaptation as a form of knowledge. This
concentration of knowledge in entities designed through
replicator based evolution is one of the most startling
emergent phenomena to have occurred in the universe. It
is the only known source of knowledge and all forms of
knowledge, even religious, were created by this process.
Biological evolution represented a huge advance in
Universal Darwinism’s search of design space for the
discovery of persistent designs. With replication it
provides a feedback mechanism by which designs are
tested, the persistent ones kept and tinkered with to
further probe design space. For example it has been
estimated that the fully functioning fish eye evolved
from light sensitive skin in approximately 400,000
generations. This is assuming that each generation
averaged variations in their eye design of 5 parts in
100,000 or .005 percent, not a lot of variation. A
better eye bestows an advantage on its bearer in the
struggle for survival and reproduction. In each
generation those with variations producing a slightly
better eye would tend to survive and pass on the
slightly better design, with slight variations, to the
succeeding generation. It is in this manner that
processes conferring persistence can be rapidly
accumulated by biological evolution.
The most complex
entity in the known universe is human culture. Six
billion human beings each with an extremely complex
nervous system are bonded together in numerous
overlapping cultural networks of religion, custom,
economics, knowledge and authority. Culture has
transformed the planet marking it with signs of
agriculture, logging and urban activity. Could this
entity have been produced by biological evolution alone?
The short answer is clearly no. The past three thousand
years, during which culture has experienced explosive
growth, is too short a period for genetic orchestration.
What then? An expanding body of evidence suggest the
answer is ‘Memes’ as first described by Richard Dawkins[iv]
and subsequently championed by many other researchers.
Memes are cultural replicators or in Dawkin’s words:
"tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, and ways
of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes
propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from
body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate them
self in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via
a process which, in the broad sense, can be called
imitation."[v]
Researchers have
used meme theory to explain many details of cultural
evolution. In essence memes are replicators like genes
that evolve in accord with an algorithm very similar to
the Darwinian algorithm. There is not a consensus on the
exact mechanism of memetic replication, what would be to
memetics as DNA is to biology, although at least one
detailed proposal has been offered.[vi]
A
growing consensus in the social sciences concludes that
cultural evolution is accomplished via Darwinian
processes. There is still a good deal of debate as the
exact nature of these processes. Memetics is a contender
in this debate and explains cultural bodies of knowledge
as meme complexes that evolve following the Darwinian
Algorithm. A general Darwinian framework for
explanations of the evolution of cultural knowledge is
Evolutionary Epistemology.
The direction is which these systems evolve is
determined by what comprises fitness. In other words the
system will become better at surviving and will
accumulate adaptations that assist its survival. What
those adaptations are is hard to predict and depend
heavily on the circumstance in which the system is
evolving.
Most cultural bodies of knowledge, including both
Science and Religion meet the conditions required of
Darwin’s algorithm. To see this, let’s examine how
science fits within this framework.
1.
Heredity. How can science be said to have heredity? New
science is often introduced in the form of an article in
a scientific journal. Even though these articles are
original research they assume a huge body of knowledge
widely shared in the scientific community. This
knowledge is more firmly established and less
speculative than the new ideas. New science can be said
to inherit this body of knowledge.
2.
Reproduction. New science can be seen as a clone of the
parent body of knowledge with some small variations. If
successful this small variation of knew knowledge will
be reproduced in the minds of other scientist, in books
and in other storage devices.
3.
Variation. The ‘fitness’ of variations introduced by the
new science will determine whether it lives or dies. If
it provides a more elegant explanation and is better
supported by the evidence, it will become an accepted
part of the parent body of knowledge, if not it will be
ignored.
The major aspect in which meme evolution differs from
biological evolution is in its increased ability to
rapidly scan design space and discover persistent
designs. Memes are replicated each time they are
re-played in a human brain, each time they are replayed
with small variations that explore neighbouring areas of
design space. An individual replicates countless memes
during their lifetime whereas they are biologically
replicated a single time in each generation. Again meme
replication is a method of Universal Darwinism that has
accelerated its relentless exploration of design space,
exposing those designs that can persist.
Memetics as a
theory of cultural evolution is still vying for wide
acceptance, but I find it a very appealing
interpretation. There are now a wide range of theories
of cultural evolution placing Darwinian mechanisms at
their core. Regardless whether Memetics comes to be the
consensus view in no way challenges the role of
Darwinian mechanisms as the moving force in culture
evolution though memetics nicely exemplifies the
approach. Richard Dawkins, one of last century’s great
evolutionist and one of its great popularizers invented
Memetics in the last chapter of his ground breaking
Selfish Gene. He merely recalled that Darwin’s
algorithm of evolving systems had nothing specific to
say about biology. The well known algorithm, first
formulated by Darwin, states that any system that
undergoes replication in an environment imposing
variable survivability on individuals inheriting
variations of traits as a result of that replication
will evolve an ability to be better at surviving.
Dawkins then speculates that seeing as how many cultural
items of knowledge are replicated or learned or
imitatated that perhaps the world contains a second
replicator, other than the biological replicator, and he
called that replicator a ‘meme’. His observations are
close to self evident; there clearly is some Darwinian
process driving cultural evolution. Whether Memetics
will turn out to be the explanatory framework best
suited to explain this Darwinian process remains to be
seen. However Memetics is a powerful explanatory aid in
understanding cultural evolution.
Bringing a second
replicator onto the scene raises a number of questions.
What happens when you have two replicators operating? Do
they work in harmony? Do they work in opposition?
Clearly to begin with they had to operate in harmony.
Biological survival was predicated on apdatations; forms
of knowledge provided by the biological replicator. If
the cultural replicator were to mess with that knowledge
it wouldn’t convey an advantage on its possessor. Our
clearest evidence for a cultural replicator operating
with early man is the archaeological record of his
tools. They show clear patterns of the evolutionary
branching and tree structure. We can conclude that if
two sets of tools used by two groups of people are
sufficiently similar then the peoples making them had
most likely been in contact; they had learned from each
other. Some form of imitation had occurred.
The knowledge of
how to build these tools conferred superior
survivability on their possessors; biological and
cultural replicators were tightly coupled. Biological
traits that helped the cultural replicator like a bigger
brain were favoured and cultural traits that helped the
biological replicator like more effective procurement of
food or better mates were also favoured.
Culture proved to be
our greatest aid in survivability and its operation is
fast. Human habitation of arctic lands is arguably one
of our great achievements. We did not have the warm fur
required to survive in that climate and development of a
biological solution (growing a thick fur coat) would
have taken many generations. Instead we saw the fur on
the polar bear and thought of ways that would allow us
to wear it. Now the polar bear is the largest land
predator in the world[vii].
It is one of very few animals who will stock a human.
The bear’s intelligence tells him that, all things being
equal, a human is a large source of foods with little
ability to defend itself or flee. As it turns out all
things are not equal, humans have empowered a second
replicator that rapidly evolves their tools. The bear
sees us as lunch but in the end we wear his fur coat.
The new replicator delivers power in a much shorter time
span than does the biological one.
And yet the new
replicator was subservient to the biological one. The
ideas it produced had to contribute to biological
survival otherwise you would be out competed. The
freedom of the new replicator was constrained to support
biological survival. It is hard to picture the Inuit
hunter as a free thinker. All his efforts, physical and
mental, had to be focused on survival. Any attempt to
decouple his thoughts from his survival would not be
rewarded.
Robert Wright in
his book Nonzero outlines a compelling scenario
of cultural evolution. He sees the evolution of culture
continuing the trend of biological evolution towards
greater complexity and he recognizes the importance of
memes in this process. In Wrights terms all evolution,
including cultural evolution, consists of finding ways
to elude the second law of thermodynamics to create
increased complexity. In cultural terms this entails
cooperative behaviour between people that produces
win-win or nonzero outcomes. The evolution of memes
facilitates the formation of ever more complex
cooperative units and is the essential glue that holds
them together. Memes evolve knowledge essential to
activities such as tool making, food production,
religion, governance and information processing provide
strength to human cooperative units and determine the
outcome of their competitive interactions with other
human groups. In this manner competition between human
groups selects for the most successful memes; memes
aiding increased cooperation within the group leading to
increased wealth and power.
Wright maps out
successive levels of group complexity that have evolved
over time: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. Each
increased level of complexity requires an increased
level of sophistication in the knowledge contained in
its memes to enable the intensified cooperative
endeavour. Bands are small groups of usually closely
related individuals with little social hierarchy. They
assist each other in the production of large tools such
as canoes, in conflicts with other bands and in hunting
and gathering food. Tribes involve larger numbers of
people from a wider variety of family groups and have a
slightly more complex social structure. Often leadership
will reside in a ‘big man’ who is responsible for
organizing cooperative projects such as the building of
fish traps or small irrigation systems and in turn might
receive a larger portion of the proceeds. Chiefdoms
consist of numerous villages joined in political
subordination to a central chief. Chiefs are endowed
with religious and military power and commands strict
obedience. Chiefdoms typically employ agriculture and
engage in large scale public works projects such as
irrigation and the building of temples. States have all
employed agriculture, have centralized leadership with
the power to raise armies and claim a monopoly on the
use of force within the chiefdom. Most have employed
sophisticated information processing facilities
including literacy and bureaucracy and many maintained a
high speed communication system such as networks of
runners carrying messages. Most also have had a state
religion.
With the
evolution of the state has come a substantial increase
in division of labour. At this level of social
complexity people tend to become less generalist in the
nature of their skills and instead focus on a
speciality. Each speciality is supported by the evolving
knowledge of its own set of memes. The more advanced the
state the smaller the proportion of its people directly
involved in procuring the basic needs of survival
through agriculture, hunting or other means. Our memes
have come to include more abstract forms of knowledge
and in this arena have become increasingly decoupled
from the constraints imposed upon memes by biological
requirements.
In many ways the
process of cultural evolution is near to the completion
of a lengthy phase. Having evolved the sustainable
complexity of human groupings through the phases of
bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states we are now in the
situation where a global state is forming. Competition
between states is winding down and becoming increasing
replaced by cooperative activity through international
organizations. The main political challenge as
understood by the main contenders during the last half
of the twentieth century was how to win a global war. In
the end after staring mutually assured destruction in
the face for decades we gave up and have largely
abandoned war as the final arbitrator of competitions
between global powers.
[i]
Smolin, L. (1997). The Life of the Cosmos.
Oxford University Press
[ii]
L. Smolin, 2004,
Scientific alternatives to the Anthropic
principal,
preprint
[iii]
Dawkins R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker,
Penguin Press
[iv]
Dawkins R. (1976).The Selfish Gene.
Oxford University Press
[v]
Dawkins R. (1976).The Selfish Gene.
Oxford University Press
[vi]
Aunger Robert (2002). The Electric Meme.
The Free Press
