Darwin Machines, Universal Darwinism
Last update: 11 Mar 1996 01:32
First version:
Changing my shape
I feel like an accident
The idea that Darwianian principles are at work in lots of places; most
especially that the brain is a (in
Wm. Calvin's
phrase) "Darwin Machine," where ideas are generated and selected by natural
selection and descent-with-variation.
Now that Dr. Calvin has a link to this page (in which I see the
none-too-subtle hand of Altavista), this notebook needs a bit more
content than that.
It's not hard to guess that a "Darwin Machine" is something which has to do
with evolution (though one could make a case for the tides instead). In fact a
Darwin Machine is anything which evolves Darwinianly. In organisms, Darwinian
evolution involves
- Organisms producing new organisms, which resemble them
(reproduction)
- Not all of the new organisms being the same as their parents, and
at least some of these changes affecting the reproductive fitness of the
altered organisms (variation or mutation)
- Descendants of variant organisms retaining their varation
(heredity)
- A lack of correlation between variations and the reproductive
fitness of the variants. (This last point is what separates Darwin from
Lamarck, to say nothing of Teilhard de Chardin. William James put it in a
nutshell in 1880: "If we look at an animal or a human being, distinguished from
the rest of his kind by the possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good
or bad, we shall be able to discriminate between the causes which originally
produced the peculiarity in him and the causes that
maintained it after it is produced; and we shall see, if the
peculiarity be one that he was born with, that these two sets of causes belong
to two ... irrelevant cycles [of causes]. It was the triumphant originality of
Darwin to see this, and to act accordingly.")
Now if we abstract from "organisms" to "replicators," we have the skeleton or
relational structure of Darwinism; and
anything with that structure is a Darwin Machine. Doubtless one could
formalize Lamarck Machines, Teilhard de Chardin Machines, etc. (Let us hope
for the sake of his wraith's tranquility that it is not possible to formalize
Goethe Machines.) (Presumably homeostatic devices are
Bernard Machines, but if I follow that thread
this will get too otsogish.) The question is, what, besides
populations of terrestrial organisms, are also Darwin
Machines?
What we know to be Darwin Machines are the immune systems of
vertebrates, and some computer programs made by
certain vertebrates. (Whether all immune systems are Darwin Machines, I don't
know.) Many of us think that science,
or routines of economic behavior, or human cultures generally, the thoughts of individual
human beings, and neural wiring in individual brains are also Darwinian, though
these are all separate hypotheses. Richard Dawkins
has advanced strong arguments that organisms anywhere in the
universe must evolve Darwinianly, that Lamarckian mechanisms are
simply inadequate for explaining the origins of adaptations, and this was what
he meant by "universal Darwinism." (His arguments neglect the possibility of
supernatural intervention; this is not a flaw.)
Having gone and said all this I must confess that when Calvin introduced the
phrase "Darwin Machine" (apparently in
1987, in imitation of the computer scientists' speaking of "Turing
Machines" and "von Neumann Machines"), his
thrust was rather more narrow, and his primary meaning was a conjectured
sequence-generating function of the cerebral cortex (part of his "throwing
theory of thought," which q.v.). The phrase has,
however, been pretty well exapted, and the new meaning is quite entrenched. As
for the original sense --- my hatred of puns is well known, but I think we have
no choice but to speak of Neural Calvinism.
Recommended:
- William Calvin, The Cerebral Symphony: Seashore
Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness [In despair of ever
locating a copy, I appealled to Usenet, and was rewarded with a message from
Dr. Calvin himself; he thought Cody's books in Berkeley might have some copies.
And indeed they did: under music.]
- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of
Species
- Daniel Dennett, Consciousness
Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea
- Peter Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and
Natural Selection
- David Hull, Science and Selection: Essays on Biological
Evolution and Philosophy of Science
- David Hull, Rodney Langman, and Sigrid Glenn, "A General Account of
Selection: Biology, Immunology and Behavior", Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (2001) [Reprinted in Hull's essay collection, above]
- William James, "Great Men and Their Environment"
- Richard R. Nelson, "Evolutionary Theories of Cultural Change: An
Empirical Perspective" ["the standard articulations of a Universal Darwinism
put forth by biologists and philosophers tends to be too narrow, in particular
too much linked to the details of evolution in biology, to fit with what is
known about cultural
evolution." PDF
preprint.]
- Henry Plotkin, Darwin Machines and the Nature of
Knowledge [An excellent book, except for his bizarre attempt to say that
every adaptation is an instance of "knowledge." Rather than try to
defend the idea that, say, the coloration of a Bengal tiger is a sort of
justified true belief, he retreats to saying that all adaptations are instances
of "biological knowledge," of which knowledge in the usual sense (i.e.,
knowledge) is a special case. By analogous methods, one can easily show that
all instances of adaptation are also instances of perfectly cooked Peking duck,
or that all language is really writing; if you put forward the
latter conceit in an unreadable book
titled Grammatology, your fortune is made.
--- But, as I said, overlooking this unfortunate little expedition into
Pickwickdom, it's a fine book.]
To read:
- Gary Cziko,
Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian
Revolution
- Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire
- Chrisantha Fernando, Richard Goldstein,
Eörs Szathmáry, "The Neuronal Replicator Hypothesis",
Neural Computation
22 (2010): 2809--2857
- Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories
of Thought and Behavior