*12 ‘Fixation’ is the technical term used by population geneticists for the on’ is the technical term used by population geneticists for the spread of a gene through the population until everybody, or almost everybody, has it. A gene can spread to fixation either (the interesting reason) because of positive natural selection, or through random chance, so-called ‘genetic drift’.
*13 That’s why I used the word ‘clockwork’ in my previous footnote defining ESS.
*14 Parthenos is Greek for ‘virgin’. Parthenogenetic lizards reproduce without benefit of males, producing ‘clonal’ daughters equivalent to identical twins of themselves.
*15 ‘Instar’ is the technical term used by entomologists for the discrete developmental stages that insects go through as they grow up. They’re discrete and discontinuous because the insect skeleton consists not of internal bones, like ours, but of external armour. Unlike bone, the external armour, once hardened, can’t grow; so the insect has to shed it periodically, then swell and grow a new suit of armour the next size up. Each of these incremental stages is an ‘instar’.
*16 Aoki’s spectacular error stems, like those of Sahlins and Washburn, from imperfect understanding of Hamilton’s theory. Hamilton included in his exposition a brief section on ‘haplodiploidy’, the peculiar genetic system of the Hymenoptera – ants, bees and wasps. Females are diploid, like us, having chromosomes in pairs. Males, however, are haploid. They have half as many chromosomes as females. All the sperms produced by an individual male are therefore identical. Hamilton ingeniously pointed out a revealing consequence: the relatedness r between full sisters is 0.75 instead of the usual 0.5, since the paternal complement of their genes is identical. A female ant is more closely related to her full sister than to her daughter! This, as Hamilton pointed out, could predispose the Hymenoptera to supreme feats of social cooperation. This idea is so clever, so charismatic even, that many readers thought it was the whole point of his theory, instead of a throwaway couple of paragraphs – the icing on the cake. Aoki evidently was one such reader. If he had understood the whole gene-selection basis of Hamilton’s theory, rather than just the few charismatic paragraphs, he would never have made his lamentable howler about his altruistic aphids. He thought they constituted a ‘grave problem’ for Hamilton’s theory. In fact, given the right conditions, Hamilton’s theory would predict even greater feats of social cooperation among clonal aphids than among ants, bees and wasps. The relatedness, r, between Aoki’s aphids is 1.0 rather than the mere 0.75 of Hymenopteran sisters. Termites, by the way, are not haplodiploid, but Hamilton had a different ingenious idea for them, based on inbreeding, to explain their social cooperation. Not that special ingenuity is really necessary. There are many combinations of B and C which could combine with an r of 0.5 to promote social cooperation and even worker sterility.
*17 One male, many females: harem-style reproduction. It’s much more common than the reverse, polyandry, for reasons that are interesting but not necessary to spell out here.
*18 I should have said, ‘Other things being equal, siblings are 16 times more likely to receive altruism than second cousins.’
III
FUTURE CONDITIONAL
ROBERT WINSTON, in his thoughtful book The Story of God, ponders the distinction between the figures of ‘priest’ and ‘prophet’ in the history of religion: the former the rulemaker, the setter of boundaries, the enforcer; the latter the visionary, the critic, the refuser of false comfort, the grit in the communal oyster. But for Richard’s protests, the present collection might have been entitled Reason’s Prophet, and this group of pieces is about the scientist as prophet in that latter sense – the sense of being prepared to tread the tightrope between informed imagination and unfounded speculation, to ‘think the unthinkable’ and thereby make it thinkable. How does the past relate to the present, and how does either relate to possible futures? For a scientist, these questions fire up the engines of imagination; in the scientific mind, they are subject to the brake of scepticism.
The first piece here, ‘Net gain’, is a reply to the annual ‘Brockman Question’ posed by the founder of the online salon and intellectual hub The Edge, John Brockman. Drawing on a long-standing interest in computers, this essay not only celebrates the extraordinary – and extraordinarily rapid – burgeoning of the internet, but makes the breathtaking suggestion that, once communication between the elements of society becomes sufficiently fast, the boundary between ‘individual’ and ‘society’ may itself disintegrate, and individual human memory wither. On the way, it makes characteristically forceful observations about some cultural and political aspects of the internet’s exponential growth, from the (poor) quality of much chat-room conversation to the (great) potential for freedom from oppressive authority it offers, via a fascinated glance at phenomena such as the taste for anonymity in communal interchange.
The second piece, ‘Intelligent aliens’, also has its origins in a Brockman initiative, this time a collection of essays on the ‘intelligent design’ movement. Here the focus shifts from possibilities of how human life might evolve further here on Earth to possibilities of contact with life forms further afield, in other parts of the universe. This particular foray out onto the tightrope represents the distinction between well-rooted speculation and declarative superstition – demonstrating, with a degree of irony, that the objective truth of science can send out imaginative probes just as daring as, and considerably better founded than, any form of supernaturalism. The next ‘dart’, ‘Searching under the lamp-post’, on the same subject but in lighter vein, takes a somewhat sceptical look at one approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The final piece in this section both continues the thread of science-based speculation and sets out with unmistakable clarity a crucial distinction: that between the ‘soul’ as detachable inhabitant of an afterlife and the ‘soul’ as locus of the human spirit, its deep well of intellectual and emotional capacity; between the soul of established religion and wistful supernaturalism, and the soul as celebrated in the title of this collection, and in Richard’s introduction to it. Under the provocative headline ‘Fifty years on: killing the soul?’, this essay delivers a ringing assertion of the aesthetic power and glory of the scientific vision alongside a brisk dismissal of any lingering Cartesian dualism. Science still has its mysteries, not least among them the nature of consciousness; but these are invitations to the scientists of the future, freed from supernaturalist constraints and set loose among the infinite possibilities of reality.
G.S.
Net gain*1
How is the internet changing the way you think?
If, forty years ago, the Brockman Question had been: ‘What do you anticipate will most radically change the way you think during the next forty years?’, my mind would have flown instantly to a then recent article in Scientific American (September 1966) about ‘Project MAC’. Nothing to do with the Apple Mac, which it long pre-dated, Project MAC was an MIT-based cooperative enterprise in pioneering computer science. It included the circle of artificial intelligence innovators surrounding Marvin Minsky but, oddly, that was not the part that captured my imagination. What really excited me, as a user of the large mainframe computers that were all you could get in those days, was something that nowadays would seem utterly commonplace: the then astonishing fact that up to thirty people simultaneously, from all around the MIT campus and even from their homes, could simultaneously log in to the same computer: simultaneously communicate with it and with each other. Mirabile dictu, the co-authors of a paper could work on it simultaneously, drawing upon a shared database in the computer, even though they might be miles apart. In principle, they could be on opposite sides of the globe.
Today that sounds absurdly modest. It’s hard to recapture how futuristic it was at the time. The post-Berners-Lee world, if we could have imagined it forty years ago, would have seemed shattering. Anybody with a cheap laptop computer, and an averagely fast wifi connection,
can enjoy the illusion of bouncing dizzily around the world in full colour, from a beach webcam in Portugal to a chess match in Vladivostok, and Google Earth actually lets you fly the full length of the intervening landscape as if on a magic carpet. You can drop in for a chat at a virtual pub, in a virtual town whose geographical location is so irrelevant as to be literally non-existent (and the content of whose LOL-punctuated conversation, alas, is likely to be of a drivelling fatuity that insults the technology that mediates it).
‘Pearls before swine’ overestimates the average chat-room conversation, but it is the pearls of hardware and software that inspire me: the internet itself and the World Wide Web, succinctly defined by Wikipedia as ‘a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the internet’. The Web is a work of genius, one of the highest achievements of the human species, whose most remarkable quality is that it was constructed not by one individual genius like Tim Berners-Lee or Steve Wozniak or Alan Kay, nor by a top-down company like Sony or IBM, but by an anarchistic confederation of largely anonymous units located (irrelevantly) all over the world. It is Project MAC writ large. Suprahumanly large. Moreover, there is not one massive central computer with lots of satellites, as in Project MAC, but a distributed network of computers of different sizes, speeds and manufacturers, a network that nobody, literally nobody, ever designed or put together, but which grew, haphazardly, organically, in a way that is not just biological but specifically ecological.
Of course there are negative aspects, but they are easily forgiven. I’ve already referred to the lamentable content of many chat-room conversations without editorial control. The tendency to flaming rudeness is fostered by the convention – whose sociological provenance we might discuss one day – of anonymity. Insults and obscenities, to which you would not dream of signing your real name, flow gleefully from the keyboard when you are masquerading online as ‘TinkyWinky’ or ‘FlubPoodle’ or ‘ArchWeasel’. And then there is the perennial problem of sorting out true information from false. Fast search engines tempt us to see the entire Web as a gigantic encyclopedia, while forgetting that traditional encyclopedias were rigorously edited and their entries authored by chosen experts. Having said that, I am repeatedly astounded by how good Wikipedia can be. I calibrate Wikipedia by looking up the few things I really do know about (and may indeed have written the entry for in traditional encyclopedias), say ‘evolution’ or ‘natural selection’. I am so impressed by these calibratory forays that I go, with some confidence, to other entries where I lack first-hand knowledge (which was why I felt able to quote Wikipedia’s definition of the Web, above). No doubt mistakes creep in, or are even maliciously inserted,*2 but the half-life of a mistake, before the natural correction mechanism kills it, is encouragingly short. John Brockman warns me that, while Wikipedia is indeed excellent on scientific matters, this is not always so ‘in other areas such as politics and popular culture where…edit wars continually break out’. Nevertheless, the fact that the Wiki concept works, even if only in some areas such as science, flies so flagrantly in the face of all my prior pessimism that I am tempted to see it as a metaphor for all that justifies optimism about the World Wide Web.
Optimistic we may be, but there is a lot of rubbish on the Web, more than in printed books, perhaps because they cost more to produce (and, alas, there’s plenty of rubbish there too*3). But the speed and ubiquity of the internet actually help us to be on our critical guard. If a report on one site sounds implausible (or too plausible to be true) you can quickly check it on several more. Urban legends and other viral memes are helpfully catalogued on various sites. When we receive one of those panicky warnings (often attributed to Microsoft or Symantec) about a dangerous computer virus, we preferably do not immediately spam it to our entire address book but instead Google a key phrase from the warning itself. It usually turns out to be, say, ‘Hoax Number 76’, its history and geography meticulously tracked.
Perhaps the main downside of the internet is that surfing can be addictive and a prodigious timewaster, encouraging a habit of butterflying from topic to topic, rather than attending to one thing at a time. But I want to leave negativity and naysaying and end with some speculative – perhaps more positive – observations. The unplanned worldwide unification that the Web is achieving (a science-fiction enthusiast might discern the embryonic stirrings of a new life form) mirrors the evolution of the nervous system in multicellular animals. A certain school of psychologists might see it as mirroring the development of each individual’s personality, as a fusion among split and distributed beginnings in infancy. I am reminded of an insight that comes from Fred Hoyle’s science-fiction novel The Black Cloud. The cloud is a superhuman interstellar traveller, whose ‘nervous system’ consists of units that communicate with each other by radio – orders of magnitude faster than our puttering nerve impulses. But in what sense is the cloud to be seen as a single individual rather than a society? The answer is that interconnectedness that is sufficiently fast blurs the distinction. A human society would effectively become one individual if we could read each other’s thoughts through direct, high-speed, brain-to-brain radio transmission. Something like that may eventually meld the various units that constitute the internet.
This futuristic speculation recalls the beginning of my essay. What if we look forty years into the future? Moore’s Law will probably continue for at least part of that time, enough to wreak some astonishing magic (as it would seem to our puny imaginations if we could be granted a sneak preview today). Retrieval from the communal exosomatic memory will become dramatically faster, and we shall rely less on the memory in our skulls. At present we still need biological brains to provide the cross-referencing and association, but more sophisticated software and faster hardware will increasingly usurp even that function.
The high-resolution colour rendering of virtual reality will improve to the point where the distinction from the real world becomes unnervingly hard to notice. Large-scale communal games such as Second Life will become disconcertingly addictive to many who understand little of what goes on in the engine room. And let’s not be snobbish about that. For many people around the world, ‘first life’ reality has few charms and, even for those more fortunate, active participation in a virtual world can be more intellectually stimulating than the life of a couch potato slumped in idle thrall to Big Brother. To intellectuals, Second Life and its souped-up successors will become laboratories of sociology, experimental psychology and their successor disciplines yet to be invented and named. Whole economies, ecologies and perhaps personalities will exist nowhere other than in virtual space.
Finally, there may be political implications. Apartheid South Africa tried to suppress opposition by banning television, and eventually had to give up. It will be more difficult to ban the internet. Theocratic or otherwise malign regimes may find it increasingly hard to bamboozle their citizens with their evil nonsense. Whether, on balance, the internet benefits the oppressed more than the oppressor is controversial, and at present may vary from region to region. We can at least hope that the faster, more ubiquitous and above all cheaper internet of the future may hasten the long-awaited downfall of ayatollahs, mullahs, popes, televangelists, and all who wield power through the control (whether cynical or sincere) of gullible minds. Perhaps Tim Berners-Lee will one day earn the Nobel Peace Prize.
AFTERWORD
Reading this again at the end of 2016 I find its generally optimistic tone a little jarring. There is alarmingly convincing evidence that the year’s momentous US presidential election (it remains to be seen quite how momentous it will prove to be, not just for America but the world) was swayed by a systematically orchestrated campaign of fake news defaming one of the candidates. If further investigation proves this to be true, one would hope legislation, or at least self-policing by organizations such as Facebook and Twitter, will follow. At present these social media exult in their freedom of contribution as well as freedom of access. There’s a minimum of editorial control,
limited to censorship of gross obscenity and violent threats: no fact-checking such as that on which reputable newspapers like the New York Times pride themselves. There are already signs that reforms may be on the way. Unfortunately they’ll be too late for the 2016 election.
* * *
*1 The literary agent John Brockman has the agreeable custom of mining his well-stocked address book every year around Christmas time and soliciting answers to an ‘Annual Edge Question’. In 2011, the question was the topical one: ‘How is the internet changing the way you think?’ This was my contribution to the resulting volume.
*2 Insertions are sometimes more vain and self-serving than malicious. While performing my ‘calibrating’ read (see above) of the entry on natural selection, I noticed that the limited bibliography contained a book which I had read and knew was scarcely at all relevant to the subject. I went in and deleted it. Within half an hour it was back, I’m guessing reinserted by the author. I deleted it again. It returned again and I gave up, beaten. It isn’t there, by the way, in the much longer and more thorough current entry.
*3 Especially now that computers make vanity publishing, with no editorial control, so cheap and easy.
Intelligent aliens*1
Science in the Soul Page 20