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The Quark and the JaguarMurray Gell-Mann |
What discerns past from future?
Another difference between the past and the future is the existence of records of the past, like tracks left in mica by the charged particles emitted when radioactive nuclei disintegrated long ago. Similar records of future disintegrations are conspicuous by their absence. That asymmetry between past and future is so obvious that we tend to overlook it.
Effective complexity
Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system.
Six impossible things before breakfast
In my discussions with people who believe six impossible things before breakfast every day, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, I have found that their main characteristic is the dissociation of belief from evidence. Many of those people, in fact, freely confess that they believe what it makes them feel good to believe. Evidence doesn’t play much of a role. They are alleviating their fear of randomness by identifying regularieties that are not there.
The weight of qualitative values
Many economists and political scientists have recommended leaving fragile values to the political process. But if that is done, all the quantitative studies, with their careful calculations of what happens to easily quantified values, have to wieghed by decision makers against qualitative arguments that are not similarly bolstered by impressive numbers. Nowadays the idea is gaining ground of actually polling people to see what kind of value they would assign to such things as a given improvement in air quality or the preservation of a park or neighborhood. In economic theory, people’s preferences are often treated as well defined, fixed, and given. That is a point of view in harmony with democratic ideals. But is the fate of the planet just a matter of untutored opinion? Doesn’t science have some insights to offer?
Perfect markets and perfect information
In a story that has long circulated among economists, a neo-classical theorist and his well-behaved little granddaughter are walking along the street in a large American city. The girl spots a twenty-dollar bill on the pavement and, being very polite, asks her grandfather if it is all right to pick it up. “No, Dear”, he replies, “if it were real someone would already have picked it up.”
One of the principal challenges to the human race...
One of the principal challenges to the human race is to reconcile universalizing factors such as science, technology, rationality, and freedom of thought with particularizing factors such as local traditions and beliefs, as well as simple differences in temperament, occupation, and geography.
What is a meme?
In fact, the English biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” to signify a unit of culturally transmitted information analogous to a gene in biological information.
Economic gain vs natural loss
Discussion of budgets leads directly to the question of whether national accouting procedures include the depletion on nature’s capital. Usually they do not. If the president of a tropical country contracts with a foreign lumber company to have a large chunk of the nation’s forests cut down for a low price and a bribe, the national accounts show the price as part of the national income, and maybe even the bribe as well if it is spent at home and not sent to a Swiss bank, but the disappearance of the forest, with all its benefits and potential, does not appear as a corresponding loss.[…] Our example also makes clear that the struggle against major corruption is a key element in achieving the economic transition.
Discounting natural's capital
Another indicator of the level of concern over living on nature’s capital is the discount rate. I understand that the World Bank, in financing projects with large environmental impacts, still applies a discount rate of 10 percent per year to the future. If that is true, it means that the loss of some great natural asset thirty years in the future is discounted by a factor of 20. The natural heritage of the next generation is valued at 5 percent of its assigned value today, if indeed it is counted at all.
The discount rate, used in this way, is a measure of what is called intergenerational equity, which is crucial to the notion of sustainable quality. Discounting the future too steeply amounts to robbing the future. If the notion of discount rate is generalized somewhat, it can be used to encapsulate much of what is meant by sustainability.
Cultural and biological evolution as additional stakes in conservation
The struggle for survival of organisms in tropical forests leads to chemical arms races and other processes that generate chemical substances with potent biological effects, many of them useful to human beings, especially in medicine. Such chemicals are being sought by two different means. One method, ethnobotany, exploits the knowledge of indigenous peoples, obtained by trial and error over hundreds or thousands of years, and thus makes use of cultural evolution as well as the biological evolution that produced the chemicals in the first place. The other method is direct chemical prospecting, in which specimens of plants and animals (insects, for example) are brought from the forest to the laboratory, where new chemicals are isolated using modern merthods of extraction. Here, the results of biological evolution are exploited without the helpful intervention of indigenous cultures. Both methods aim to find at least a few chemicals that will finally be utilized, say by drug manufacturers, often in developed countries. Even when such chemicals are used in modified or synthetic form, ways must be found for a significant fraction of the profits to be returned to the people of the forest or the surrounding areas. Only then can the process of exploration and utulization give those local people an additional stake in preserving the forest.
The same is true of the many schemes for maketing other nontimber forest products, such as nuts and succulent tropical fruits.’As usual, incentives create selection pressures on the schemata for human behavior.
Academic reward
If an academic publishes a novel research result at the forntier of knowledge in science or scholarshipy, he or she may reap a reward in the form of a professorsjip or a promotion, even if the result is later shown to be entirely wrong. However, clarifying the meaning of what has already been done (or picking out what is worth learning from what is not) is much less likely to advance an academic career. Humanity will be much better off when the reward structure is altered so that selection pressures on careers favor the sorting out of information as well as acquisition.
Some Prescriptions for How to Escape into a Deeper Basin
Some of the suggestions for speeding upt the process of conceiving a creative idea fit in well with the pircture of using a controlled level of noise to avoid getting stuck in too shallow a basin of attraction. One can try to escape from the original basin by means of a random perturbation – for example Edward DeBono recommends trying to apply to a problem, whatever it is, the last noun on the front page of today’s bewspaper.
Another method is akin to brainstorming, which has been used throughout the postwar era. Here several people try to find a solution to a problem by meeting for a group discussion in which one is encouraged to build on someone else’s suggestion but not to attack it, no matter how bizarre it is. A crazy or self-contradictory proposal can represent an unstable state of thinking leading to a solution. DeBono likes to cite as an example a discussion of river pollution control, in which someone might say, “What we really need is to make sure that factories are donwstream from themselves.” That is a manifestly impossible suggestions, but someone else might then come up with a more serious proposal, saying “You can do something like that if you require the intake of water at each factory to be downstream from the effluent.” The crazy idea can be regarded as a rise on a fitness landscape that can lead to a much deeper basin than the one from which the discussion started.
For a case more like that of biological evolution...
For a case more like that of biological evolution, we can turn to the competition among human societies in the past. To a great extent, fitness was measured by population. In Southeast Asia, for instance, some ethnic groups practiced irrigated rice agriculture while others raised dry rice, often by slashing and burning the forest. The irrigated-rice peoples, such as the Central Thai, the Lao, or the Vietnamese, were able to put many more individuals on the ground per unit area than their neighbours. Denser population helped them to dominate the dry-rice peoples, and in many cases to drive them back into remote hilly terrain. Looking toward the future, we may well ask whether it is desirable for density or total numbers to continue to determine winners and losers in the same way.
Deception Among Birds
For amusing examples of the exploitation of opportunities by species interacting with other species, we can turn to lying as practiced by animals other than humans. Deception by mimicry is well known; the viceroy butterfly, for instance, resembles the monarch and thus profits by the bad taste of the latter. The cuckoo (in the Old World) and the cowbird (in the New World) practice another kind of deception by lazing their eggs in the nests of other birds; the intrusive chicks then do away with the eggs or chicks that belong in the nest and monopolize the attention of the foster parents. But actual lying?
We are accumstomed to hearing people lie, but it is somehow more surprising in other organisms. When the Argentine Navy spots a mysterious periscope in the estuary of the Río de la Plata just before the budgets of the armed forces are to be considered by the legislature, we suspect that deception is being practiced so as to capture additional resources, and we are not particularly astonished. But the analogous behaviour among birds is more unexpected.
One such case was discovered recently by my friend Charles Munn, an ornithologist studying mixed feeding flocks in the lowland tropical forest of Manu National Park in Peru. Some species forage together in the understory or lower canopy of the forest and others in the middle canopy, where they are sometimes joined by colorful fruit-eating tangers from the upper canopy. (Amon the species found in those flocks in winter are a few North American migrants. Further north in South and Central America there are many more. We residents of North America know them as nesting species in the summer and are intrigued to find them leading a very different life in a distant land. If they are to return zear after year to nest, their habitats in the southern countries will be jeopardized if North American forests are chopped up into still smaller parcels than the ones now remaining. For one thing, thinning out the forests permits further inroads bei parasitic cowbirds.)
In each mixed feeding flock, there are one or two sentinel species, which move about in such a way that they are usually near the center of the flock or just below. The sentinels warn the others by a special call of approaching bird that might turn out to be raptors. Charlie noticed that the sentinels for the understory flocks sometimes gave the warning signals even when no danger was apparent. Looking more closely, he found that the fake alarm often permitted the sentinel to grab a succulent morsel that another member of the flock might otherwise have eaten. Careful observation revealed that that the sentinels were practicing deception about 15 percent of the time and often profiting by it. Wondering if the phenomenon might be more general, Charlie examined the behavior of the middle canopy flocks and found the sentinels there are doing the same thing. For the two species of sentinels, the percentage of false signals was about the same. Presumably, if the percentage were much higher, the signals would not be accepted by the rest of the flock (recall the story The Boy Who Cried “Wolf”), and if it were much lower, the opportunity for the sentinel to obtain extra food by lying would be partially or wholly wasted. I am intrigued by the challenge of deriving by some kind of mathematical resoning the figure of about 15 percent; in a plausible model, might it come out one divided by two pi? When I asked that question of Charles Bennett, he was reminded of something his father had told him about the Royal Canadian Air Force units based in England during the Second World War. They found it useful, when sending out a fighter and a bomber together, to attempt occasionally to deceive the Luftwaffe by positioning the fighter below the bomber rather than above. After a good deal of trial and error, they ended up following that practice at random one time in seven.
Advantages of sexual reproduction
In any case, the advantages of sexual reproduction must be considerable to outweigh the obvious disadvantage of breaking up the successful genotypes of parents and grandparents that survived long enough to reproduce. These advantages accrue to the population as a whole, however, while many evolutionary biologists insist that selection pressures are exerted only on individuals. Perhaps that need not be a rigid rule.
At a recent Santa Fe Institute meeting, John Maynard Smith, who teaches at the University of Sussex, was commenting on this issue, when Brian Arthur, chairing the session, recalled the occasion when they first met. Both men have a background in engineering. Maynard Smith became an aircraft designer and then took up evolutionary biology, to which he has made some remarkable contributions. Brian, who grew up in Belfast, went into operations research and then economics, becoming a professor at Stanford and the founding director of the economics program at the Santa Fe Institute. The first encountered each other at a scienfice meeting in Sweden, where Maynard Smith remarked in the course of a lecture that while sex had obvious advantages for a polulation, it was not clear what it did for the individual. Brian called out from the audience, “What a very English view of sex!” Maynard Smithm without missin a beat, replied, “I gather from your accent that you’re Irish. Well, in England at least we have sex.”
Inclusive fitness and the selfish gene
A further complication in utilizing the concept of fitness arizes in higher organsisms that make use of sexual reproduction. Each such organism conveys only half its genes to a given offspring, while the remaining half derive from the other parent. The offspring are not clones, but merely close relatives. And the organism has other close relatives, the survival of which can also contribute to the propagation of genes similar to its own. Thus biologists have developed the notion of “inclusive fitness”, which takes account of the extent to which relatives of a given organism survive to reproduce, weighted according to the closeness of the relationship. (Of course inclusive fitness also takes account of the sirvival of the organism itself.) Evolution should have a general tendency to favor genotypes exhibiting high inclusive fitness, especially through inherited patterns of behavior that promote the survival of an organism and its close relatives. Tha tendency is called “kin selection”, and it fits nicely with a picture of evolution in which organisms are merely devices “used” by genes to propagate themselves. That point of view has been popularized under the name of the “selfish gene.”
Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system.
Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system. Some of those regularities can be traced back to the fundamental physical laws governing the universe. Others arise from the fact that many characteristics of a given part of the universe at a given time are related to one another through their common origin in some past incident. Those characteristics have features in common; they exhibit mutual information. For example, automobiles of a given model resemble one another because they all originate from the same design, which contains many arbitrary features that could have been chosen differently. Such “frozen accidents” can make themselves felt in all sort of ways. Looking at coins of King Henry VIII of England, we may reflect upon all the references to him not only on coins but in charters, in documents relating to the seizure of abbeys, and in history books and how those would all be different if his elder brother Arthur had survived to mount the throne instead of him. All those references depend on the same frozen accident.
If the interference between each pair of coarse-grained histories is zero...
If the interference between each pair of coarse grained histories is zero, either exactly or to an exceedingly good approximation, then all the coarse grained histories are said to decohere. The quantity $D$ of each coarse-grained history and itself is then a true probability, with the additive property. In practice, quantum mechanics is always applied to sets of decohering coarse-grained histories, and that is why it is able to predict probabilities. ($D$, by the way, is called the decoherence functional; the wod “functional” indicates that it depends on histories.)
The algorithmic information content of each alternative history of the universe...
The algorithmic information content of each alternative history of the universe evedently receives a tiny contribution from the simple fundamental laws, along with a gigantic contribution from all the quantum accidents that arise along the way. But it is not only the AIC of the universe that is dominated by those accidents. Although they are chance events, their effects contribute heavily to effective complexity as well.
The effective complexity of the universe is the length of a concise description of its regularities. Like the algorithmic information content, the effective complexity receives only a small contribution from the fundamental laws. The rest comes from the numerous regularities resulting from “frozen accidents.” Those are chance events of which the particular outcomes have a multiplicity of long-term consequences, all related by their common ancestry.
Limerick on the speed of light
There was a young lady named Bright
Who could travel much faster than light.
She set out one day, in a relative way,
And returned home the previous night.
Theory tends to emerge as a profession as a science matures...
Theory tends to emerge as a profession as a science matures and as the depth and power of theoretical methods increase. But the roles of theory and observation should be regarded as distinct whether or not there are separate classes of practitioners for the two activities.
Similarly, in the will of the Swedish dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel...
Similarly, in the will of the Swedish dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel, who established the Nobel prizes, the science prizes are listed with physics first, chemistry second, and physiology and medicine third. As a result, the physics prize is always awarded at the beginning of the ceremony in Stockholm. If there is just one physics prize winner and that winner is a married man, it is his wife who comes into dinner on the arm of the King of Sweden. (When my friend Abdus Salam, a citizen of Pakistan and a Muslim, received a share of the physics prize in 1979, he turned up in Sweden with his two wives, np doubt causing some problems of protocol to arise.) The winner or winners in chemistry rank second in protocol, and those in physiology and medicine third. Mathematics is omitted from Nobel’s will for reasons that are not really understood. There is a persistent rumor that Nobel was angy with a Swedish mathematician, Mittag-Leffler, for stealing the affections of a woman, but, as far as I know, it is only a rumor.
But is the information obrained from the outside world...
But is the information obtained from the outside world, for example from a parent who speaks the language in question, sufficient to construct such an internal grammar? That question has been answered in the negative by Noam Chomsky and his followers, who conlcude that the child must come already equipped at birth with a great deal of information applicable to the grammar of any natural human language. The only plausible source of such information is a biologically evolved innate proclivity to speak languages with certain grammatical features, shared by all natural human languages. The grammar of each individual languange also contains additional features, not biologically programmed. Many of those vary from language to language, although some are probably iniversal like the innate ones. The additional features are what the child has to learn.
It is not at all atrivial matter that there are such things as species...
It is not at all a trivial matter that there are such things as species; and they are not just artifacts of the biologist’s mind, as has sometimes been claimed. Ernst Mayr, the great ornithologist and biogeographer, likes to recount how, as a young researcher in New Guinea, he counted a hundred and twenty-seven species of birds nesting in the valley where he was working. The members of the local tribe counted a hundred and twenty-six; the only difference between their list and his was that they lumped together two very similar species of gerygone that Ernst, with his scientific training, was able to distinguish from each other. Even more important than the agreement among different sorts of people is the fact that the birds themselves can tell whether or not they belong to the same species. Animals of different species are not usually in the habit of mating with one another, and in the rare cases where they do, the hybrids they produce are likely to be sterile. In fact, one of the most successful definitions of what constitutes a species is the statement that there is not effective exchange of genes by ordinary means between members of different species.
Nietzsche introduced the distiction between...
Nietzsche introduced the distinction between “Apollonians,” wo favor logic, the analytical approach, and a dispassionate weighing of evidence, and “Dionysians,” who lean more toward intuition, synthesis and passion. These traits are sometimes described as correlating very roughly with emphasis on the use of the left and right brain respectively. But some of us seem to belong to another category: “Odysseans,” who combine the two predilections in their quest for connections among ideas.
Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself...
Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no glueing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. Chapter 22 describes some efforts just getting under way to carry out such a crude study of world problems, including all the relevant aspects, not only environmental, demographic, and economic, but also social, political, military, diplomatic, and ideological. The object of the study is not just to speculate about the future, but to try to identify among the multiple possible future paths for the human race and the rest of the biosphere any reasonably probable ones that could lead to greater sustainability. Here the word sustainability is used in a broad sense, including not only the avoidance of environmental catastrophe, but of catastrophic war, widespread long-lasting tyranny, and other major evils as well.