The first ancestor who polished a stone into a handsomely symmetrical hand axe must have looked pretty stupid in the process. There he sat, rubbing away for hours on end, to no apparent effect. But hidden in the interstices of all the mindless repetition was a process of gradual refinement that was well nigh invisible to the naked eye designed by evolution to detect changes occurring at a much faster tempo. The same appearance of futility has occasionally misled sophisticated biologists. In his elegant book Wetware, the molecular and cell biologist Dennis Bray describes cycles in the nervous system:
In a typical signaling pathway, proteins are continually being modified and demodified. Kinases and phosphatases work ceaselessly like ants in a nest, adding phosphate groups to proteins and removing them again. It seems a pointless exercise, especially when you consider that each cycle of addition and removal costs the cell one molecule of ATP—one unit of precious energy. Indeed, cyclic reactions of this kind were initially labeled “futile.” But the adjective is misleading. The addition of phosphate groups to proteins is the single most common reaction in cells and underpins a large proportion of the computations they perform. Far from being futile, this cyclic reaction provides the cell with an essential resource: a flexible and rapidly tunable device.
The word “computations” is aptly chosen, for it turns out that all the “magic” of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, re-entrant, reflexive information-transformation processes, from the biochemical scale within the neuron to the whole brain sleep cycle, waves of cerebral activity and recovery revealed by EEGs. Computer programmers have been exploring the space of possible computations for less than a century, but their harvest of invention and discovery so far includes millions of loops within loops within loops. The secret ingredient of improvement is always the same: practice, practice, practice.
It is useful to remember that Darwinian evolution is just one kind of accumulative, refining cycle. There are plenty of others. The problem of the origin of life can be made to look insoluble (“irreducibly complex”) if one argues, as intelligent-design advocates have done, that “since evolution by natural selection depends on reproduction,” there cannot be a Darwinian solution to the problem of how the first living, reproducing thing came to exist. It was surely breathtakingly complicated, beautifully designed—must have been a miracle.
If we lapse into thinking of the prebiotic, pre-reproductive world as a sort of featureless chaos of chemicals (like the scattered parts of the notorious jetliner assembled by a windstorm), the problem does look daunting and worse, but if we remind ourselves that the key process in evolution is cyclical repetition (of which genetic replication is just one highly refined and optimized instance), we can begin to see our way to turning the mystery into a puzzle: How did all those seasonal cycles, water cycles, geological cycles, and chemical cycles, spinning for millions of years, gradually accumulate the preconditions for giving birth to the biological cycles? Probably the first thousand “tries” were futile, near misses. But as the wonderfully sensual song by Gershwin and DeSylva reminds us, see what happens if you “Do it again” (and again, and again).
A good rule of thumb, then, when confronting the apparent magic of the world of life and mind is: Look for the cycles that are doing all the hard work.
Keystone Consumers
Jennifer Jacquet
Postdoctoral researcher in environmental economics, University of British Columbia
When it comes to common resources, a failure to cooperate is a failure to control consumption. In Garrett Hardin’s classic tragedy, everyone overconsumes and equally contributes to the detriment of the commons. But a relative few can also ruin a resource for the rest of us.
Biologists are familiar with the term “keystone species,” coined in 1969 after Robert Paine’s intertidal exclusion experiments. Paine found that by removing the few five-limbed carnivores—the purple sea star, Pisaster ochraceus—from the seashore, he could cause an overabundance of its prey, mussels, and a sharp decline in diversity. Without sea stars, mussels outcompeted sponges. No sponges, no nudibranchs. Anemones were also starved out, because they eat what the sea stars dislodge. Pisaster was the keystone that kept the intertidal community together. Without it, there were only mussels, mussels, mussels. The term “keystone species,” inspired by the purple sea star, refers to a species that has a disproportionate effect relative to its abundance.
In human ecology, I imagine diseases and parasites play a similar role to Pisaster in Paine’s experiment. Remove disease (and increase food) and Homo sapiens takes over. Humans inevitably restructure their environment. But not all human beings consume equally. While a keystone species refers to a specific species that structures an ecosystem, I consider keystone consumers to be a specific group of humans that structures a market for a particular resource. Intense demand by a few individuals can bring flora and fauna to the brink.
There are keystone consumers in the markets for caviar, slipper orchids, tiger penises, plutonium, pet primates, diamonds, antibiotics, Hummers, and sea horses. Niche markets for frog legs in pockets of the United States, Europe, and Asia are depleting frog populations in Indonesia, Ecuador, and Brazil. Seafood lovers in high-end restaurants are causing stocks of long-lived fish species like orange roughy or toothfish in Antarctica to crash. The desire of wealthy Chinese consumers for shark-fin soup has led to the collapse of several shark species.
One in every four species of mammals (1,141 of the 5,487 mammalian species on Earth) is threatened with extinction. At least seventy-six mammalian species have become extinct since the sixteenth century—many, like the Tasmanian tiger, the great auk, and Steller’s sea cow, because of hunting by a relatively small group. It is possible for a small minority of humans to precipitate the disappearance of an entire species.
The consumption of nonliving resources is also imbalanced. The 15 percent of the world’s population that lives in North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia consumes thirty-two times more resources, like fossil fuels and metals, and produces thirty-two times more pollution than the developing world, where the remaining 85 percent of humans live. City dwellers consume more than people living in the countryside. A recent study determined that the ecological footprint for an average resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, was thirteen times higher than that of his suburban/rural counterpart.
Developed nations, urbanites, ivory collectors: The keystone consumer depends on the resource in question. In the case of water, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of use in the United States; large-scale farms are the keystone consumers. So why do many conservation efforts focus on households rather than on water efficiency on farms? The keystone-consumer concept helps focus conservation efforts where returns on investments are highest.
Like keystone species, keystone consumers also have a disproportionate impact relative to their abundance. Biologists identify keystone species as conservation priorities because their disappearance could cause the loss of many other species. In the marketplace, keystone consumers should be priorities because their disappearance could lead to the recovery of the resource. Humans should protect keystone species and curb keystone consumption. The lives of others depend on it.
Cumulative Error
Jaron Lanier
Musician, computer scientist; virtual reality pioneer; author, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
It is the stuff of children’s games. In the game of “Telephone,” a secret message is whispered from child to child until it is announced out loud by the final recipient. To the delight of all, the message is typically transformed into something new and bizarre, no matter the sincerity and care given to each retelling.
Humor seems to be the brain’s way of motivating itself—through pleasure—to notice disparities and cleavages in its sense of the world. In the telephone game, we find glee in the violation of expectation; what we think should be fixed t
urns out to be fluid.
When brains get something wrong commonly enough that noticing the failure becomes the fulcrum of a simple child’s game, then you know there’s a hitch in human cognition worth worrying about. Somehow, we expect information to be Platonic and faithful to its origin, no matter what history might have corrupted it.
The illusion of Platonic information is confounding because it can easily defeat our natural skeptical impulses. If a child in the sequence sniffs that the message seems too weird to be authentic, she can compare notes most easily with the children closest to her, who received the message just before she did. She might discover some small variation, but mostly the information will appear to be confirmed, and she will find an apparent verification of a falsity.
Another delightful pastime is overtransforming an information artifact through digital algorithms—useful, if used sparingly—until it turns into something quite strange. For instance, you can use one of the online machine-translation services to translate a phrase through a ring of languages back to the original and see what you get. The sentence “The edge of knowledge motivates intriguing online discussions” transforms into “Online discussions in order to stimulate an attractive national knowledge” in four steps on Google’s current translator (English→German→Hebrew→Simplified Chinese→English). We find this sort of thing funny, just like children playing “Telephone”—as well we should, because it sparks our recollection that our brains have unrealistic expectations of information transformation.
While information technology can reveal truths, it can also create stronger illusions than we are used to. For instance, sensors all over the world, connected through cloud computing, can reveal urgent patterns of change in climate data. But endless chains of online retelling also create an illusion for masses of people that the original data is a hoax.
The illusion of Platonic information plagues finance. Financial instruments are becoming multilevel derivatives of the real actions on the ground, which finance is ultimately supposed to motivate and optimize. The reason to finance the buying of a house ought to be at least in part to get the house bought. But an empire of specialists and giant growths of cloud computers showed, in the run-up to the Great Recession, that it is possible for sufficiently complex financial instruments to become completely disconnected from their ultimate purpose.
In the case of complex financial instruments, the role of each child in the telephone game corresponds not to a horizontal series of stations that relay a message but to a vertical series of transformations that are no more reliable. Transactions are stacked on top of each other. Each transaction is based on a formula that transforms the data of the transactions beneath it on the stack. A transaction might be based on the possibility that a prediction of a prediction will have been improperly predicted.
The illusion of Platonic information reappears as a belief that a higher-level representation must always be better. Each time a transaction is gauged to an assessment of the risk of another transaction, however, even if it is in a vertical structure, at least a little bit of error and artifact is injected. By the time a few layers have been compounded, the information becomes bizarre.
Unfortunately, the feedback loop that determines whether a transaction is a success or not is based only on its interactions with its immediate neighbors in the phantasmagorical abstract playground of finance. So a transaction can make money based on how it interacted with the other transactions it referenced directly, while having no relationship to the real events on the ground that all the transactions are ultimately rooted in. This is just like the child trying to figure out whether or not a message has been corrupted by talking only to her neighbors.
In principle, the Internet can make it possible to connect people directly to information sources, to avoid the illusions of the game of Telephone. Indeed, this happens. Millions of people had, for example, a remarkable direct experience of the Mars rovers.
The economy of the Internet as it has evolved incentivizes aggregators, however. Thus we all take seats in a new game of Telephone, in which you tell the blogger, who tells the aggregator of blogs, who tells the social network, who tells the advertiser, who tells the political action committee, and so on. Each station along the way finds that it is making sense, because it has the limited scope of the skeptical girl in the circle, and yet the whole system becomes infused with a degree of nonsense.
A joke isn’t funny anymore if it’s repeated too much. It is urgent for the cognitive fallacy of Platonic information to be universally acknowledged and for information systems to be designed to reduce cumulative error.
Cultural Attractors
Dan Sperber
Philosophy and cognitive science professor, Central European University, Budapest
In 1967, Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of a meme, a unit of cultural transmission capable of replicating itself and undergoing Darwinian selection. “Meme” has become a remarkably successful addition to everybody’s cognitive toolkit. I want to suggest that the concept of a meme should be, if not replaced by, at least supplemented with that of a cultural attractor.
The very success of the word “meme” is, or so it seems, an illustration of the idea of a meme: The word has now been used billions of time. But is the idea of a meme being replicated whenever the word is being used? Well, no. Not only do “memeticists” have many quite different definitions of “meme,” but also, and more important, most users of the term have no clear idea of what a meme might be. The term is used with a vague meaning, relevant in the circumstances. These meanings overlap, but they are not replications of one another. The idea of a meme, as opposed to the word “meme,” may not be such a good example of a meme after all!
The case of the meme idea illustrates a general puzzle. Cultures do contain items—ideas, norms, tales, recipes, dances, rituals, tools, practices, and so on—that are produced again and again. These items remain self-similar over social space and time. In spite of variations, an Irish stew is an Irish stew, Little Red Riding Hood is Little Red Riding Hood, and a samba is a samba. The obvious way to explain this stability at the macro level of the culture is, or so it seems, to assume fidelity at the micro level of interindividual transmission. Little Red Riding Hood must have been replicated faithfully enough most of the time for the tale to have remained self-similar over centuries of oral transmission, or else the story would have drifted in all kinds of ways and the tale itself would have vanished, like water in the sand. Macro stability implies micro fidelity. Right? Well, no. When we study micro processes of transmission—leaving aside those that use techniques of strict replication, such as printing or Internet forwarding—what we observe is a mix of preservation of the model and construction of a version that suits the capacities and interests of the transmitter. From one version to the next the changes may be small, but when they occur at the population scale, their cumulative effect should compromise the stability of cultural items. But—and here lies the puzzle—they don’t. What, if not fidelity, explains stability?
Well, bits of culture—memes, if you want to dilute the notion and call them that—remain self-similar not because they are replicated again and again but because variations that occur at almost every turn in their repeated transmission, rather than resulting in “random walks” drifting away in all directions from an initial model, tend to gravitate around cultural attractors. Ending Little Red Riding Hood when the wolf eats the child would make for a simpler story to remember, but a Happy Ending is too powerful a cultural attractor. If someone had heard only the story ending with the wolf’s meal, my guess is that either she would not have retold it at all (and that is selection) or she would have modified it by reconstructing a happy ending (and that is attraction). Little Red Riding Hood has remained culturally stable not because it has been faithfully replicated all along but because the variations present in all its versions have tended to cancel one another out.
Why
should there be cultural attractors at all? Because there are in our minds, our bodies, and our environment biasing factors that affect the way we interpret and re-produce ideas and behaviors. (I write “re-produce” with a hyphen because, more often than not, we produce a new token of the same type without reproducing in the usual sense of copying some previous token.) When these biasing factors are shared in a population, cultural attractors emerge. Here are a few rudimentary examples.
Rounded numbers are cultural attractors: They are easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes. So we celebrate twentieth wedding anniversaries, hundredth issues of journals, the millionth copy sold of a record, and so on. This, in turn, creates a special cultural attractor for prices, just below rounded numbers—$9.99 or $9,990 are likely price tags—so as to avoid the evocation of a higher magnitude.
In the diffusion of techniques and artifacts, efficiency is a powerful cultural attractor. Paleolithic hunters learning from their elders how to manufacture and use bows and arrows were aiming not so much at copying the elders as at becoming themselves as good as possible at shooting arrows. Much more than faithful replication, this attraction of efficiency when there aren’t that many ways of being efficient explains the cultural stability (and also the historical transformations) of various technical traditions.
This Will Make You Smarter Page 17