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The Quark and the JaguarMurray Gell-Mann |
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.