Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett

thank you John what I'm going to talk about tonight is R&D research and development of two kinds research and development it's a design process exploiting information in the environment to create maintain and improve the design of things and Ardie always takes time and energy and there are two main varieties one is evolution by natural selection and the other is human intelligent design notice lower case there will not be a single word beyond this sentence about upper case intelligent design in this talk tonight the process is different to in several fundamental ways first of all evolution is purposeless it's for sightless it's extremely costly think of the billions trillions of lives that are wasted on bad trials and it's slow intelligent design is purposeful somewhat foresighted governed by cost considerations and usually relatively fast but there's more differences than that and I'm going to explore a few of them evolution may be slow and costly but it's brilliant the late Francis Crick once had a joke about this what he called or gel's second rule teasing his colleague Leslie Orgel and that is evolution is cleverer than you are and anybody who's in evolutionary biology knows that very often whether you're working at the molecular level or at the ecological level you find some feature of some organisms it seems this is daft this is stupid design and then later you can't come to realise it's much much more clever than you realize it's actually more clever than you are so that's Orgel second rule now intelligent design of the human sort now exists we have lots of intelligent designers around and it's becoming ever more intelligent with some pride some surprising implications and that's what I'm going to talk about tonight on the left we see a termite castle an Australian termite castle on the right we see gaudi's famous Sagrada família Church in Barcelona they are remarkably similar in shape and in construction even inside and yet I propose they are built and designed by profoundly different processes the one on the left is built by termites who are I hope I don't offend any termite lovers here they're pretty clueless they don't know what they're doing they don't know why they're doing it there is no architect termite or boss as a queen termite but she's not really the boss they're just mindlessly cluelessly uncomprehendingly doing their little thing and this amazing castle arises gaudi on the other hand is almost a comic caricature of the creative genius the megalomaniac big boss lording it over everybody publishing manifestos raising money with very grandiose gestures and all the rest so you couldn't have a better contrast between Gaudi the top-down intelligent designer the genius and the termites the clueless bottom-up builders so we have bottom-up design versus top-down design and here's a puzzle this is a real puzzle a termite colony I looked this up the other day might have as many as 70 million clueless termites and termite colonies can do some very clever things clever enough so that books have been written that there's a book called the soul of the white ant which some of you may have read which suggests that a termite colony has a soul well they do they forage very intelligently they're very efficient they're very they're very clever as a colony in many ways but of course you will have noticed they don't write poetry or make spaceships or things like that 70 million clueless termites is not enough to give you a very great intelligence a brain might be 200 billion clueless neurons smaller but even more clueless and now here is the question how do you get a Gaudi type mind out of a termite colony brain if you think of your brain as a termite colony several orders of magnitude larger you wonder how can you get the kind of top-down intelligence that Gaudi exhibits out of the brain which is very large collection of basically uncomprehending little single cells neurons now there's a short answer and that's this friend of mine once said you can't do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can't do much thinking with your bare brain that's very much to the point so if you don't use your bare hands what do you use you use thinking tools a termite colony as a bear brain doesn't have any thinking tools gaudí on the other hand had a well equipped mind equipped by eons millennia of culture where'd he get his tools well the wrong answer comes from Freeman Dyson lovely man great scientist but he said this technology is a gift of God after the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts it is the mother of civilizations of arts and of Sciences I entirely approve of his honouring of Technology but I don't believe for a minute that he's got the source right so that's the wrong answer here's the long answer cultural evolution cultural evolution in our species and only in our species design thinking tools that now impose novel structures on our brains evolved virtual machines that then run on the basic underlying wetware of our neurons and glial cells and it's that long answer that I'm not going to try to articulate a little bit more a wonderful book you'll see as I go along this is a sort of book report talk I'm going to be mentioning a number of books that I think very highly up one of them is this book by John Maynard Smith the late great one of my heroes John Maynard Smith and Earth zap Mari from Budapest the major transitions in evolution ninety-five and in it they describe how evolution evolves how over the three and a half billion years of evolution there have been some profound transitions which change it's like shifting gears evolution goes into a higher gear that can then explore design space more fruitfully more efficiently here is their list there's the eukaryotic revolution about which more a little bit more in a moment sex you'll be happy to know is one of the major transitions multicellularity cell differentiation as a mother and then language and human culture are the fourth and fifth and which comes first is an open question which I'm trying to close but it's not easy now I'm going to talk only about eukaryotic revolution and language in human culture because I want to point to a striking and surprising similarity between these two major transitions this is my favorite diagram of the Tree of Life every living thing that has ever lived is represented in one way or another on this tree and let's see I think probably this outer edge here can you can see the arrow yeah that's the present so everything that's alive today is along this outer rim here the mammals inhale here we way down here on sale on this branch right here this is the origin of life three and a half billion years ago and as you can see first there were the bacteria or the archaea when Eisenberg whose tree of life this is I hedges his bets about whether the archaea are as their name suggests the first but they may be they may not be we don't have to settle that but for about a billion years what we had was just these single-celled organisms the so called prokaryotes and then something wonderful happens and you can see it right there it's where that great sudden turn happens finally pointer again there it is right about there we get the great eukaryotic Ellucian everything else you see all the colored things those are all eukaryotes where eukaryotes basically to a first approximation every living thing that you can see with the naked eye is a eukaryote multi-celled eukaryotic organism so what is this great revolution it's this on the Left we see a simple prokaryote on the right we see a complicated you carrot you as as the suffix as the prefix suggests means good or better they're bigger they have more moving parts they're much fancier they're simply more versatile they're bigger all right so how do we get from the simple cells on the left to the cell on the right by an amazing thing that only had to happen once one day after a billion years or so of you care of prokaryotes swimming not swimming well drifting around in the water two different prokaryotes not twins two different prokaryotes with perhaps two billion years of independent R&D to create their particular powers they bumped into each other it's no doubt happened a lot but on this occasion instead of a eating be engulfing B and using B for energy in parts or be taking a apart from the inside they join forces in an endosymbiotic relationship they became a new thing an a B and the a B thing was fitter than A or B by themselves and so they proliferated and they had a common fate and they began to their genomes began to merge and that was the birth of the eukaryotic cell and the great fossil trace of that as everybody should know is in the fact that eukaryotic cells have two or three more two genomes here's your nuclear genome your nuclear genome that's for instance your human DNA and then there's your mitochondrial DNA and the mitochondria are the descendants of direct descendants of early prokaryotes that join forces with with other prokaryotes to form the eukaryotic cells you get all your mitochondrial DNA from your mother none from your father so this is a great moment this coming together this chance collision a moment of endosymbiosis symbiosis living together endo because ones inside the other and it was the late lynn margulis who first really drove that point home she wasn't the one who invented the idea or first thought of it but she's the one who persisted in spite of ridicule and and much disagreement and disapproval and she eventually won the case and it's in all the textbooks now so we owe a lot to Lynne for that wonderful campaign she fought on behalf half of endosymbiosis so what we have here is a great case of Technology Transfer you've got two independent traditions of R and D they come together and boom you get this sudden explosion of competence that you didn't have before now I want to describe another explosion the McCready explosion this was 10,000 years ago Paul MacCready the late Paul MacCready was a Caltech engineer some of you probably know of him he was the designer of the gossamer albatross the human powered plane that flew across the English Channel a very much into green environmental engineering and he calculated the 10,000 years ago that's just a twinkling ago in geological or biological time the human population this is at the dawn of Agriculture plus their livestock and pets was less than 1% maybe a tenth of a percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass by weight that is to say of the animals we're not including the insects or the worms we're not including the fish in the sea or any of the unicellular organisms were we're just including animals basically a terrestrial vertebrates and 10,000 years ago less than 1% what do you suppose the percentage is today rather more would anybody hazard a guess 10% anybody think it might be higher than 10 I heard 99 no 98 well where is it here 98 percent by his cup maybe by now it's 99 Paul MacCready made this a few years ago we and our most of that is cattle by the way we have engulfed the planet in one of the most remarkable transitions ever and that's it's happened in the last 10,000 years in a twinkling faster than the Cambrian explosion this is the fastest and most dramatic change in life-forms well maybe maybe some of the great extinctions would be would be viable candidates for just as for similarly sudden changes to the biosphere what is responsible for well he has a wonderful thing to say about he says over billions of years on a unique sphere chance has painted a thin covering of life complex improbable wonderful and fragile suddenly we humans have grown in population technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power we now wield the paintbrush and our genes are just the same as the genes of people 100,000 years are very a few important a few important differences but not many genetic differences between us and and our ancestors going back even a few hundred thousand years but look at what's changed technology and intelligence is the key justice Freeman Dyson said so this was another great technology transfer and I'm going to put it in sort of deliberately dramatic terms the invasion of human brains by symbiotic thinking tools memes Richard Dawkins memes from The Selfish Gene now I know that a lot of people have a visceral dislike of the idea of memes and I have been fending off second rate and third rate objections to memes now for 20 years and more and there are even a few almost first-rate objections which I will be dealing with some merrily in my next book I'm here to tell you memes are okay and they really do some wonderful work I'm going to give you a sketch of some of the work that they do and show you why you should if you if you think memes are a bad idea you might want to change your mind these thinking tools we don't inherit them via our genes they're not instincts we're not born with them we don't have to design them ourselves nobody has nobody in this room had to design calculus or long division or alphabetization or language or the wheel we acquire these in our culture in our education and I'm in growing up and learning we don't have to design them ourselves and here's a really important point nobody has to design them any more than anybody has to design the Nightingale or the palm tree they are products of a Nardi process of cultural evolution not genetic evolution but cultural evolution which is very much like evolution by natural selection of genes but in this case we're talking about the evolution of means now the McCready explosion was an explosive amplification of human competence that's just obvious it was competence largely without comprehension in the early days it's only recently very recently in many regards only in the last hundred years or less that we've really come to understand what the heck happened and to understand a lot of the tools that we're using nevertheless it happened thanks to those tools and this competence without comprehension has evolved into competence with comprehension and this is what I like to call the Darwinian strange inversion Rhian verted one of my favorite passages of criticism of Darwin was written by a man named Robert Beverly Mackenzie in 1868 I love this passage because the passion of it the capital letters are in the original and here's what Mackenzie had to say in the theory with which we have to deal absolute ignorance is the artifice so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system but in order to make a perfect a beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it this proposition will be found on careful examination to express in condensed form the essential purport of the theory and to express in a few words all mr. Darwin's meaning who by a strange inversion of reasoning seems to think absolute ignorance fully qualified to take the place of absolute wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill exactly that's it that's just what Darwin showed and it's a strange inversion of reasoning it's still strange to many people they have a hard time getting their head around this how could absolutely ignorant do all this brilliant design work so here's the Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning according to McKenzie in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine it's not requisite to know how to make it now I'm going to talk about touring and his strange inversion you'll notice a similarity in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is Darwin and touring before touring computers were people intelligent people they probably read maths and University out of work they would work doing computation what are you I'm a computer I work for such-and-such a company doing computation and what touring realized was that wasn't necessary he could boil all the comprehension out and give you just basic minimalistic nope no comprehension at all and he could get arithmetic and if you've got arithmetic and conditional branching it's off to the races you can compute anything that's what Oren showed so what Darwin and touring showed and this is a strange inversion is copy competent competence without comprehension the process of natural selection doesn't understand anything and doesn't have to similarly the CPU on your computer doesn't have to understand anything and yet they're both remarkably competent processes that can build and build and build and do more and more Rd and this bottom-up Rd is what we've seen ever since in other words mind or consciousness or understanding is not the cause the first cosmic it's an effect and a very recent effect now termites are not intelligent designers beavers are not very intelligent designers we are the first intelligent designers in the Tree of Life and we're way over there that's about six million years that little why that little fork and so intelligent design starts with one species about there and that's the first intelligent design since life started on the planet a term of mind which I wish I could Rico and do otherwise because a lot of people don't like this term it gives them the willies or something heebie-jeebies is free-floating rationales what's a free-floating rationale it's a reason why something is the way it is but it's nobody's reason trees do things for reasons as any botanist can explain to you Ong do things for reasons the biotic world is saturated with reasons from the molecular scale on up and we do things for reasons we shiver we vomit we blink they're not our reasons they are the reasons why we do them we don't have to know them we do not have to comprehend these reasons for these to be the reasons that we're acting as we do and we even also choose and decide and act for reasons that we don't need to appreciate I'm going to give you an animal example and suggest that although it looks at first strikingly I like what we human beings do it's not that different starting you've probably seen David Attenborough film or somesuch nature documentary where you see these preposterous wild high leaps that the gazelles do when they're being chased by say lions in Africa it's called starting why do they do it it looks risky it looks dangerous it looks show off you what's going on well we now have a very good idea what the reason is why they do why they do it this is the free-floating rationale of this particular behavior it's sending a signal don't bother chasing me I can make these or energetically expensive leaps and still outrun you go after my cousin who can it's a vivid case of what's known as costly signaling theory and it has to be costly otherwise it wouldn't be credible if all the animals could do it the lion would be wise not to believe but the lion does believe this communicative act and doesn't chase but the gazelles that can start so it's serving a purpose it is transferring information from the gazelle to the lion they both benefit it's a stable system but here's the important thing neither the gazelle nor the lion needs to understand this this signaled the speech act as far as the gazelle is concerned who doesn't know why it wants to throw these ridiculous leaves it just does it gets a great urge if it can to throw those leaps and it does it's the beneficiary of this clever strategy without understanding it at all and certainly the lion doesn't have to figure out who the ones that can leap must be faster and they're showing off to me no no don't put soliloquies like that in the in the lion's head if you want to put a monologue in the lion's head but what line is your thief I don't want to chase those guys I don't know why but I just not attractive somehow I'll go for the ones that don't do those leaps they don't have to understand the system works anyway hint a lot more of human communication is like starting then tradition would have it and a lot of animal communication is exactly like starting this is competence without much comprehension because you don't really have to comprehend and it's a good thing that we can have examples of meaning and communication without comprehension because if we're going neuroscience we got a lot of signaling going on in the neurons between the eyes and the lateral geniculate nucleus and v1 and v2 and all of these different areas of the all these signals are being sent and the neurons don't have to understand any of it but there are reasons why they're doing what they're doing and information is being transmitted but it's just not being comprehended by the receivers doesn't have to be so the problem that cultural evolution solves is how we get a Goudy mind out of a termite colony brain how do we get intelligent design with representation of the reasons gaudi's type of intelligent design or Touring's type of intelligent design out of 200 billion mindless neurons it was the second great endosymbiotic revolution we are its human culture we are Apes with infected brains our brains from the day we're born that even before we're born already memes are entering our brains through our ears through our eyes and taking up residence and building novel virtual machines thinking machines thinking tools in our brains that change the functional architecture of our brains viruses are not alive they don't have a metabolism basically they are just strings of nucleic acid with attitude that is to say thanks to their sequence they have a shape and thanks to their shape they have a amazing competence without any comprehension at all to infiltrate into cells and trick those cells into making copies of them instead of their own genetic material that's how viruses replicate and of course evolution of viruses is classic evolution by natural selection being alive is thus not a requirement for evolution by natural selection because viruses aren't alive and they sure do evolve the evolution of HIV since it was first sequenced has involved more change than the human genome has changed since we parted company from our common ancestor with chimpanzee well you might say but how about being a material thing is that necessary is that necessarily a requirement for evolution maybe not being alive but certainly have to be a material thing and the answer is no you know viruses depend on living cells to reproduce memes which are informational things depend on living brains to reproduce and they're not made out of anything except information this is a hard point for many people to accept and some people like some very smart and clever sophisticated people are not happy with this line of mine but I'm going to present it to you and try to defend it first of all I want to point out this is not dualism or if it is then the hardware/software distinction is dualism but of course it's not in any bad sense it's a perfectly respectable dualism how many of you believe in the existence of software now I mean what is Bill Gates a fraud how did he make his money he sold software was it valuable yes does it exist of course what is it made of bits that's what it's made of here's another book I recommend highly Peter Godfrey Smith philosopher biology was it Harvard now he's at NYU Darwinian populations and natural selection Oxford University Press 2009 in this book Peter introduces something that he calls Darwinian spaces and I've come to think of this as one of my favorite new thinking tools I didn't put it in intuition pumps because I would have had to do too much teaching on the side about evolutionary biology and I thought well I'll save that I'll use these and introduce them in the next book so let me see if I can characterize this this is just that a three space of a sort that you see in many different scientific graphs and the thing is you can take any three properties in which there's variation in living phenomena and put them on the three axes X Y & Z Zed for you and just consider all the other dimensions fixed at some neutral vanilla value or however you want we look at three dimensions at a time and we can pick and choose what dimensions we put and then we can look at comparing phenomena in this space to see how Darwinian they are because one of the lessons of Darwinism is you want to be a Darwinian about Darwinism and recognize that it doesn't have an essence there isn't just one sort of Darwinism there's all sorts of sort of Darwinian phenomena that are almost our winni and rather Darwinian it's rather like the transition from Thor apps it's to mammals you got a lot of creatures that are neither obviously mammals nor obviously therapsids we're the ancestors of mammals perfectly good living creatures they just didn't fit into those pigeonhole as well they were neither mammals north or APS's or maybe they were both don't even worry about it you don't have to draw the line similarly we should look for there to be Darwinian phenomena which are only sorta Darwinian and you'll see in these diagrams the paradigm is up here at 1 1 1 full doses of all 3 dimensions that's what he draws these diagrams so we have the zero-point and the dimensions he put up here this is his first one our sort of standard as everybody knows I hope you have to have very high fidelity replication in the genes to sustain evolution if the replication makes if errors accumulate too fast then evolution stops that's known as the error catastrophe but it can't be perfect if if the fidelity of replication of genetic material was perfect then you'd have no mutations and evolution would have come to a stop so in the parade cases of evolution you've got to have very you have to be very high on the h scale the heredity fidelity scale but not all the way to perfection this is if you want to have a naturalistic meaning of original sin that should be it vs dimension dependency of realized fitness differences on intrinsic properties is best understood as a contrast let's look at something that is selected for a non intrinsic property right now in this room if we held a like a tennis tournament an elimination tournament a coin flipping tournament some did win the tournament but it would not be as it were for an intrinsic property they'd just be lucky and that would mean that we no reason to think that they on the very next coin flip they'd be any more likely to win than anybody else right well there are many extrinsic properties one of the most interesting is the realtors favorite location location location and that's why Godfrey Smith has put human cells up here they're selected there's very high fidelity of replication of the genetic material in human cells basically all the cells in your body have the same genome there's some mutations that do occur and you have also a smoothness of fitness landscape I'll get to that in just a moment but the main thing is that for instance in in embryonic development you have many more neurons born than are going to survive the ones that are in the right place at the right time make the connections they survive the other ones get selected out and and their materials are reused for the next generation in embryonic development so it's a very Darwinian process but it isn't perfectly Darwinian it isn't the full-fledged parade case because you don't have selection for cause you have selection for an extrinsic property location even though the neurons themselves may all be alike the one that happens to be in just the right place is the one that survives I won't bother talking about the other the other dimension there it's smoothness of fitness landscape if you have a rugged Fitness landscape that evolution is hard because small steps in any direction may simply throw you off a cliff instead of slightly higher up the hill to the to the summit of a fitness space you if you understand what a fitness landscape is so we'll move on this is one of my applications of PGS is Peter Gregory Smith spaces and I want to look at the origin of life just very swiftly before up in the upper right hand corner we have the Darwinian case of bacteria they evolve by genuinely Darwinian means because they replicate but before you have bacteria or whatever the first living forms were you don't have replication and a lot of people skeptics origin of life skeptics that well there has to be a miracle no because you have all these quasi Darwinian proper processes which can make the probability of getting to a replicator much more likely you have differential persistence vers is differential reproduction some processes prebiotic abiotic processes simply outlast others more stable and since they're outlasting them they can gather what are like mutations and hence this can change that can change the probability of the odds of other things happening when you have thousands of asynchronous cycles all working together this keeps generating novelty generating new combinations and in the fullness of time you get back here and nobody knows how to nobody knows how to fill this space in time we start in an abiotic world and some trajectory takes us up there to the darwinian case we don't know what it is but we sort of know some of the dimensions that have to be moved through whether a membrane comes first or whether reproduction or metabolism comes first you've got to have all three by the time you get to bacteria but the order in which they come is very much up for grabs now here we get to the one that matters here's my main diagram of cultural evolution and you'll see that I've put the termite castle down here this is zero zero zero but now I've inverted Darwin's inversion I put the pure Darwinian case down in this corner where it's bottom up no comprehension and where the search in the space is essentially random it's not it's not directed search at all there's no information use it's it's this coin flip search what you search so this is our pure Darwinian case the termite castle culture and up here in this corner is intelligent design and what I'm suggesting is it cultural evolution over thousands of years but not millions only thousands of years has moved from very Darwinian to very intelligent design we are now living in the age of intelligent design of culture so we want to look at this D Darwin izing of cultural evolution from the first beginnings of for instance language and that's why we see the termite castle down at the bottom and why I've put up in the intelligent design corner you'll notice I put Picasso's name why did I put Picasso there not because I think he's the smartest most intelligent designer ever but because he said he was Jeunesse Esch pocket roof this is a brilliant lie balderdash to use a polite word he did a lot of searching in order to find I don't search I find notice what he's saying is not for me random search not for me grubby trial and error I just leap to the highest peak in the design space every time I comprehend perfectly nothing heavy semi about me I am at the very pinnacle I'm an intelligent designer well he this junior chefs pleasure truth is a perfect motto for the intelligent designer but as I say it's never realized it certainly wasn't realized by Picasso he was a very clever dude I think a lot of his intelligence was that although he did a lot of searching made sometimes hundreds of sketches his brilliance was signing and selling the sketches along with the finished product so Picasso couldn't meet that but he can serve as emblematic of of that extreme position on the graph I want to thank Matt Ridley my friend that Ridley for this wonderful slide to cultural artifacts on the left you have an actual a and hand axe on the right you have the mouse of course two products of human culture nobody invented the Asheville a and and ax nobody Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse the hand axe was used with hardly any changes at all for close to a million years there are different theories about what it was exactly for my favorite is that it was the human artifice or version of the Peacocks tail but basically you are saying this is costly signaling I am so good you say this to the ladies that I can make all these hand axes and still stay alive either I'm very good at making hand axes are very good at stealing hand axes I got a lot of you want to come up and see my hand access this was this was a actually Merrick Cohen's idea that that the Ashland hand axe was was a bit of costly signaling and there's a one particularly interesting data in its favor and that is that troves of these have been found you know dozens never use all together in a pile a little treasure pile of Ashley in hand axes lovingly crafted never used for anything so maybe that was come up and see my hand access we don't know but in any case that was an example of sort of above the termite but long way down low on the on the scale Norbert Wiener who is the youngest and perhaps most famous graduate of my University Tufts University the founder of cybernetics the corner of the term cybernetics once said information is information not matter or energy no materialism that does not admit this can survive at the present day I want to underline that I think is exactly right as I say information is not matter or energy it's information and we've got to take it seriously and I want to look at some things made of information habits words poems songs jokes games pseudo coup crossword puzzles techniques dead reckoning surveying long division Bayesian statistics PCR and software these are all things made of information and I want to point out only the software is made of bits I'm not talking about bits when I'm talking about information I'm talking about information in a more fundamental sense Shannen information measured in bits is a recent and very important refinement of a one concept of information but it's not the concept I'm talking about I'm talking about the concept of information where when one chimpanzee learns how to crack nuts by watching his mother crack nuts there's information passed from mother to offspring and that is not in bits that is that is an informational transfer is not accomplished in in any Shannon Channel that is worth talking about so habits I've just mentioned one chimpanzees learning I want I put this slide in because I want to acknowledge that yes we're not the only species with culture arguably whales have two or three or seven items of culture and chimpanzees have maybe a dozen culturally transmitted habits that are not in the genome but nothing goes explosive nothing goes commit to minute Oriole except in our species we're the ones where culture really takes off so now let's look at words in the beginning we had what I want to call sin anthropic words aseneth robic species are species that evolved by natural selection but are not domesticated we don't own them that they are sin anthropos they are with us human beings so sinneth robic species would include mice and rats and pigeons and bed bugs and body lice their sin we don't own them we don't domesticate them but they are evolved to live and thrive in our company barn swallows chimney Swifts birds and the first words I argue were sin entropic words the people that were infested with these didn't know what they were doing they didn't know they were talking they weren't even really paying attention to what was happening but words were beginning to take up residence in their world and move from head to head via mouth and here and this was the birth of language there's a long story to be told about how that all works out I'm not going into that tonight because I'm just giving you the bird's eye view then we move into a period where we have domesticated words these are not just species of meme that thrive in human company but we're beginning to pay tension to controlling their replication which is usually the standard mark of domestication if you control the reproduction of a species for your own purposes then you've domesticated that species so we have domesticated words then we have coined words which is a little bit like genetically engineered organisms these are invented by the have particular authors meme of course is a good example of a coin meme Dawkins is the coin er not one word in 10,000 in our vocabulary is a coin word most of the words have no author's no creators at all they are products of cultural evolution and then we get technical terms which are takes it up even a notch further and then we finally get to internet memes and when I put this up here I know some of my students and others they suddenly think AHA now you're in the trouble you're in the soup now then it why because they think this is just the reductio ad absurdum of doc Dawkins concept of memes Dawkins introduced means to be evolve errs to be things that evolved by natural selection but internet memes are the creations the intelligent their creations of presumably intelligent designers there's competitions on the internet who can design the meme that goes viral best so this is what seem to be the very an intelligently designed meme would seem to be a contradiction in terms and I've for a while I thought so too and I would I'd applaud the fact the Dawkins wonderful word and concept was being sullied was being was being cheapened by being transformed in this way into the word it is on the Internet and then I suddenly realized no no maybe this is a contradiction in terms so what after all a splittable atom is also a contradiction in terms the word Adam initially meant unsplit Abel thing a thing without parts a complete unit without any parts at all now we have splittable atoms the very idea of sub atomic particles was in contradiction in terms when it was first introduced but we went alignment we kept the term and we understood that it was in a certain sense Mis name where we had we had a richer interpretation of what atoms were same thing as true of memes what we should realize is that the original memes down in the bottom layer when human cultural evolution was very Darwinian they were pretty much exactly what Dawkins said they were and they've since become more and more intelligently designed more and more domesticated to where we now have memes we'll still call them that even though they're not products of Darwinian natural selection they're products of intelligent design it reminds me of course with an earlier contradiction and that was Darwin's the very one that McKenzie pointed out the very idea weary inverted Darwin's strange inversion cui bono from the law who benefits is a question that evolutionary biologists should always ask themselves and we talk about three kinds of symbionts in biology neutral lists that do good for us commensals and parasites only the parasites are bad for our our fitness reducing and as you probably know there's actually trillions of symbionts in your body right now that you couldn't that you couldn't live without they're mutualists they're the floor and your gut and so forth and they're actually trillions more of viruses which are not doing you any harm although symbionts well the same is true of memes there are mutual lists commensals and parasites and one of the key insights of memetics this is I think the key inside the mimetics is that meme evolution creates adaptations that enhance the fitness of memes independently of whether in fact enhances our Fitness human fitness is not the end all and be all that it is that the species Fitness is and other species how many of you think that having more grandchildren than anybody else is the most important thing in life I don't see any hands in other words unlike every other species on the planet you have things that you think are more important that's because your head is full of memes if it weren't you would be like every other living thing on the planet and all you all of your energies would be for having more offspring what do you see say right now look more closely and you'll notice that the h and the a are exactly the same shape you've corrected unconsciously corrected those shapes in your mind that's an example of simple digitization you're correcting to the norm and you're doing it because you have a system that of course is written language I want to point out that the same feature is in spoken language in words spoken so we're going to have a little experiment so I want you to listen carefully and repeat after me Mun defy the epigastrium then again once more perfect do you know what it means no you don't care second case again listen carefully repeat after me I didn't really cut it out it's kind of an again now now do it a third time you can't do it there was just as much energy the rise and fall of the graph was as striking in the third case as in the first but you didn't have the evn the english virtual machine in your brain which automatically corrected to the norm by identifying the phonemes that is digitisation it is exactly the same trick that is used in computers to give them high fidelity transmission it's exactly the same trip that's used in DNA phonemes are one of the great evolutions one of evolutions greatest inventions right up there with DNA which is a which is a four-member alphabet AC G and T and phonemes are remarkably unreal if you know about the physics of phonology they don't correspond to any simple physical properties they're like they're like benign illusions that are that are generated in your head by the machinery you have in your brain Boyd and Richardson a wonderful book another wonderful book not by genes alone is very good on the early days at the bottom level of my diagram of cultural evolution they concentrate on how cultural evolution starts with minimally comprehending vectors they have a very simple rule I copied the successful and it generates interesting results so they're very good on the early days how to get cultural evolution up and running against many countervailing forces in evolution so its competence with minimal comprehension leading to a little bit of myopic comprehension but now we want to move beyond that in between we have every degree in combination of semi insightful tinkering one of my favorite examples is the Polynesian canoe in a wonderful article by Rogers and Eric about how the Polynesian canoe evolved over time they quote a French actually he was writing not about Polynesian canoes I've learned but about but about fishing Britany fishing vessels every boat is copied from another boat let's reason as follows in the manner of Darwin it's clear that a very badly made boat will end up on the bottom after one or two voyages thus never be copied one could then say with complete rigor that it is to see herself who fashions the boats choosing those which function and destroying the others as it comes back copy it that's natural selection doesn't require any particular comprehension you don't have to be a naval architect you follow that rule and the boats are going to gradually get better you may make some mutations most of your mutations may make worse boats it doesn't matter any that happen to make better boats that will be copied and so forth so we put the Polynesian canoe sort of in the middle of the diagram interesting to note that what I'll call the economic model of culture is up in the top layers our standard traditional idea of human culture is that it consists of treasures that are made by other by the most creative genius people we honor them we preserve them we spend money protecting them we there the legacy we pass on to the next generation this is sort of high culture and it's an economic model these are these are goods but human culture has a lot of other things in it which are not necessarily goods at all they're just features they're not particularly prized but they survive and you take and they travel along anyway those are the sinan tropic cultural elements for instance okay in the middle we've got what I call foible exploiters competences with limited comprehension provided by mechanisms that are good enough for government work as one says that have characteristic foibles and falling short that can then be exploited in arms races and that's what we see in the world of human culture scams pyramid schemes are too obvious examples it's a quasi Darwinian process so we're now in the age of intelligent design cultural evolution has become ever more top-down ever more comprehending and self comprehending ever more refined in its search methods so as genetic evolution thanks to general genetically modified foods and craig Venter and genetic engineering in general is very much a matter of intelligent design of genes but I want to end by pointing to the age that we're now entering the age of post intelligent design in many fields intelligent designers are exploiting the truth of Orgel second rule remember evolution is cleverer than you are it turns out that we can now harness evolution to do a lot of the design work for us genetic algorithms were first area which that happened you you probably use a computer device which is optimized by genetic algorithms deep learning the current bandwagon and artificial intelligence is a good example this evolutionary architecture I'm going to show you an example and some evolutionary approaches to nanotechnology the Ottawa House of Commons has a roof this sort of sunroof which was intelligently designed by a John Sullivan at MIT using evolutionary architecture this is these are a few slides from one of his presentations so we have a fitness landscape there's one building and you see it in the space and then he tests it in various ways for efficiency use of energy etc etc etc and there's another one and there's another one and out of this selection comes the best design and it's better than he can do without using evolution I'm going to end on this nice note Francis Arnold one of one of my heroes one of my heroines won the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering in 2013 she's a Caltech bio engineer and here's what she does she evolves proteins that have never existed before on the planet when one of her supervisors when she was a graduate student said but Francis there's no protein in nature that has the competences that you're hoping to put into these proteins she says that's because there's never been selection for that so she's creating new selection pressures in the lab and evolving proteins by really quite classic evolution and that she says consequently these enzymes may open up whole new regions of chemical space that could not be explored in previous medical chemistry efforts we're developing new tools for protein engineering and using them to create new and improved catalysts for carbon fixation sugar release from renewable polymers such as cellulose biosynthesis of fuels and chemicals so the age of post intelligent design of evolutionary design is now upon us thank you very much for your attention you look back at the Daniel Dennett to the wombo bond 3 in 1964 and the evolution of your thinking since then what are the two or three ideas that have taken you out of what would have been a smooth evolution of thought

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 426,418

Rating: 4.6745901 out of 5

Keywords: Ri, Royal Institution, Daniel Dennett (Author), Philosophy (Field Of Study), science, information, theory, intelligent design, Evolution (Quotation Subject), talk, lecture, meme, god, convergence, Neuroscience (Field Of Study)

Id: AZX6awZq5Z0

Length: 61min 45sec (3705 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2015