things to think about

In which Dawkins examines apparently altruistic animal behaviour and attempts to explain it in terms of the benefits gained by a selfish gene for such behaviour, expanding into an analysis of reciprocal altruistic relationships, where both partners gain from the relationship. He then zooms in to the level of our own bodies and suggests that “we are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes”. Finally, he covers cross-species altruism and shows that this is no different from that found between animals of the same species.

p167

Even if we start our model with no tendency towards aggregation at all, and the prey animals start by being randomly dispersed, the selfish urge of each individual will be to reduce his domain of danger by trying to position himself in a gap between other individuals. This will quickly lead to the formation of aggregations which will become ever more densely bunched.

This will be familiar to anyone who’s played around with emergent systems – the simple rules Dawkins describes here which give rise to flocking behaviours sound a lot like the rules you’d program into a boids simulation.

p182

Perhaps then there are other double or multiple organisms which we have not recognized as such. Perhaps even we ourselves? [...] We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes. [...] The other side of this coin is that viruses may be genes who have broken loose from ‘colonies’ such as ourselves.

This is a really fascinating idea, and one which I believe Dawkins goes on to explore in “The Extended Phenotype”. My interpretation of it is that we don’t have to think of our bodies (or any animal, or plant) as a homogenous monolith whose parts all evolved together in lockstep, but as the result of a collection of genes which code for mutually beneficial functions that may have drifted together at different times from different sources. The body we end up with is the most stable and useful combination of traits collected over time from a much larger pool. We are a Swiss Army Knife of genes

But, now that we have eschewed the ‘good of the species’ view of evolution, there seems no logical reason to distinguish associations between members of different species as things apart from associations between members of the same species.

This is the discussion of cross-species altruism I mentioned earlier. From the point of view of a selfish entity entering into a mutually beneficial relationship, it makes no difference whether the other party is a member of that entity’s species or not. The single important factor is the benefit to that entity from the relationship. Nothing more, nothing less.

There’s a question here: why, then, do we see much more altruism between family members, then species members, than between species? We’ve already seen explanations of family altruism in Chapter 6. I suppose the answer to species altruism could be the simple fact that an entity is more likely to be around other members of its own species than other species, and therefore has more opportunity for altruistic acts, but this feels a bit unsatisfying.

p185

But now, suppose there is a third strategy called Grudger. [...] therefore the proportion of individuals in the population who bear a grudge against any given cheat will be small.

The “Grudger” strategy described here reminded me very much of a recent episode of Radiolab. In the final part of this episode, there is a discussion of Robert Axelrod‘s work on the evolution of cooperation, primarily a series of tournaments Axelrod ran “around 1980″ between software agents designed to play The Prisoner’s Dilemma according to different strategies. Each agent played a number of consecutive rounds of the dilemma against every other agent, and the agent which tended to fare best was declared the “best” strategy for the problem. The winning strategy was “Tit for tat“, a simple set of rules which stated that favours would be repaid, but “if provoked, the agent will retaliate”. That there is similarity between Dawkins’ & Axelrod’s work shouldn’t be surprisng, considering they were both working from the same game theory-derived ideas, but it is interesting to note that both Dawkins and Axelrod arrived at the same optimal strategy from completely different starting points.

p187

But in spite of the cheats, the relationship between fish cleaners and their clients is mainly amicable and stable.

There’s a simple reason for this, which is implied by the strategy modeling earlier in the chapter: if cheats started to outnumber cleaners, then the benefits gained by clients for letting these smaller fish into their personal space would reduce to the point where eating them would be the better strategy.

From “The Language Instinct”, Steven Pinker, pp72-73

Cooper and Shepard flashed thousands of slides, each showing a single letter of the alphabet, to their long-suffering student volunteers. Sometimes the letter was upright, but sometimes it was tilted or mirror-reversed or both. [...] The subjects were asked to press one button if the letter was normal (that is, like one of the letters in the top row of the diagram), another if it was a mirror image (like one of the letters in the bottom row). To do the task, the subjects had to compare the letter in the slide against some memory record of what the normal version of the letter looks like right-side up. Obviously, the right-side-up slide (0 degrees) is the quickest, because it matches the letter in memory exactly, but for the other orientations, some mental transformation to the upright is necessary first. Many subjects reported that they [...] “mentally rotated” an image of the letter to the upright. By looking at the reaction times, Shepard and Cooper showed that this introspection was accurate. The upright letters were fastest, followed by the 45 degree letters, the 90 degree letters, and the 135 degree letters, with the 180 degree (upside-down) letters the slowest. In other words, the farther the subjects had to mentally rotate the letter, the longer they took. From the data, Cooper and Shepard estimated that letters revolve in the mind at a rate of 56 RPM.

I finally got around to going through this talk a few times over the last few weeks, and have transcribed parts that I think are particularly significant (which ended up being pretty much much all of it). I’ve also added some notes and musings of my own.

Ironically, progress was much impeded by my contracting a couple of plain old biological viruses

***

Dennett opens by describing an ant parasite which affects its host’s brain, causing the ant to behave in a way which increases its chances of being eaten by a predator. Why? Because the next stage of the parasite’s life cycle takes place in the predator’s gut.

03:00

Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one’s own genetic fitness, of course.

03:26

It’s ideas, not worms, that hijack our brains

03:30

Now, am I saying that a sizeable minority of the world’s population has had their brain hijacked by parastic ideas? No, it’s worse than that: most people have!

03:52

There are a lot of ideas to die for. Freedom [...], justice, truth, Communism? Many people have laid down their lives for Communism, and many have laid down their lives for Capitalism. And many for Catholicism, and many for Islam.

04:15

These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They’re infectious.

04:32

Most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking, it’s infectious repetitis, and we might as well have a theory of what’s going on when that happens, so that we can understand the conditions of infection.

04:52

Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others.

05:30

One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives.

05:40

The subordination of genetic interest to other interests. No other species does anything at all like it.

06:52

We’re all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but their likely misuses.

07:57

Memes are like viruses.

08:13

What’s a virus? A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude. That is, there’s something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that’s what a meme is. It’s an information packet with attitude.

08:30

What’s a meme made of? They’re made of information, can be carried in any physical medium.

08:54

Words are memes that can be pronounced. Then there’s all the other memes that can’t be pronounced, there’s different species of memes.

09:07

Remember the Shakers?

Dennett describes how the Shaker creed included celibacy, and how this makes it unsurprising the faith died out. But, in fact, this isn’t how they disappeared! The Shakers existed at a time when the social safety nets we have today didn’t, and there was a “ready supply” of “widows and orphans” for the sect to convert. Thus, the religion “could have continued forever with perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts, the idea passed on through proselytising instead of through the gene line.”

10:22

A meme can flourish in spite having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shakerdom was essentially a sterilising parasite.

11:10

It was germs, more than guns or steel that conquered the new hemisphere.

11:21

When European conquerors and explorers and travellers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to. [...] These pathogens just wiped out the native people who had no immunity to them at all. And we’re doing it again. We’re doing it this time with toxic ideas.

12:56

These memes are spreading around the world, and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages, they are wiping out traditions and practices. And it’s not our fault, any more than it’s our fault when our germs lay waste to people who haven’t developed the immunity.

13.21

We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies around the edges of our culture. We’re a free society, so we let pornography and all these things, y’know, we shrug them off, they’re like a mild cold, they’re not a big deal for us. But we should recognise that for many people in the world, they are a big deal.

13.47

As we spread our education and our technology, one of the things that we are doing is, we are the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favourite memes, the memes that they are prepared to die for.

14:20

Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger.

14:30

If you’ve had a friend who’s died of AIDS, then you hate the HIV virus, but the way to deal with that is to do science and understand how it spreads and why, in a morally neutral perspective. Get the facts, work out the implications. There’s plenty of room for moral passion, once we’ve got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do.

15:00

And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures and the like that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.

15:30

That’s all the time I have, so thank you very much for your attention.

***

For me, there’s a couple of interesting points to come out of this talk besides the main explicit themes.

The first is a question of how vectors of memetic infection work. Dennett touches on it, when he talks about the drive to spread memes and their existence as a “packet of information with attitude” which can be spread in “any physical medium” [emphasis mine]. Most of the memetic theory I’ve seen so far takes it for granted that memes hop from brain from brain to brain and has a lot to say about what they do once they get there, but doesn’t examine the nature of those vectors; by this token, a meme could travel equally effectively by being encoded into written words and emailed as it could by being spoken in a radio broadcast or painted on a canvas. Anyone with a basic understanding of information theory (and mine is a basic as it gets) could tell you that this is wrong: any channel of information transmission is susceptible to noise, and different types of information are suited to different methods of transmission (and vulnerable to different types of noise). I think this could prove an interesting area of study, and one I very much intend to follow, once I’ve got my basic knowledge up to scratch. Who knows, maybe there’s already a vast body of theory in this area I have yet to discover.

The second point is to do with our responsibility to control the spread of our toxic ideas; putting aside the worryingly Colonial feel to the proposition for the moment (“Look at the poor natives with their inferior set of memes!”), what is it that makes Western memes so much more rapacious, so much better at replicating than those in a poor beleaguered victim meme-system? Is this even true?

If it is true, I’d like to suggest that it’s for the same reason that Russian prisons are such an infamously fertile breeding ground for drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. As an undergraduate, I did a bit of study on signs and semiotics and, as I remember, some of the theory there stated that we live in an age where we’re so bombarded by signs and symbols that the ‘real’ world has ceased to have any meaning. Whilst a sign and a meme aren’t equivalent units (I’d say, possibly, that a sign refers to a meme), I don’t think it’s a huge leap to say that a society swimming in signs is also one equally suffused with memes (of course, memetics says that society is composed of memes, but there’s probably a question of volume here), and therefore an ideal breeding ground for increasingly voracious memes.

Time to revisit my degree notes; I think trying to reconcile semiotics and memetics could prove another interesting area of study. Unless, of course, there’s another huge body of theory I’m ignorant of there, too.

There’s a counter-argument here, too: why in the world would memes good at surviving in one meme-system be any good at surviving in a completely different memetic environment?

***

It occurs to me that I haven’t really defined a meme so far on this blog, despite having picked up a reasonable definition from various bit of reading. So, I think my next post will be about the definition of a meme, so I can be sure to be working from a solid base.

In which Dawkins discusses how behaviour is evolutionary and has its roots in the genes, and how the seemingly stable and predictable actions of individuals in a interacting group (an “evolutionarily stable strategy”, or ESS) are in fact reached by a number of individuals acting selfishly.

p68: It would seem that, as with genetic evolution, the most effective behavioural strategies are reached in systems which contain a certain amount of randomness (which you would expect, it is, after all, the same system in macrocosm).

p78: A lot of the simple “conditional strategies” discussed here (“If you are the resident, attack; if you are the intruder, retreat”) look a lot like simple if…then…else statements. How far does the computer / brain analogy stretch, especially when we’re talking about simple, early brains which would appear to be simple decision-making machines?

This is exactly the point where I got a bit bogged down in this book, and left it to one side for a while. Terribly lightweight and academically lazy of me, I know, but it seemed to me that I was starting to drift away from the point of my study which, at this point, is to learn about memes, not the intricacies of biological evolution. I think by now I’ve learned enough about the abstract concepts of replicators and their evolution to understand how memes are analogous, and (as we shall find out), even Blackmore states in The Meme Machine (1999, p17) that:

“[both] genes and memes are replicators and must obey the general principles of evolutionary theory and in that sense are the same. Beyond that they may be, and indeed are, very different – they are related only by analogy”

***

Something just occured to me: if we think of a replicator as a packet of information, or collection of rules, which creates seeming complexity by its iteration, can we say that (for example) the rule-sets of cellular automata, fractals and the algorithms governing emergent systems are similar (albeit lesser) kinds of information? I suppose the ability to evolve through competition and mutation is the key difference here.

The post I made yesterday, particularly the bit about consciousness-as-illusion, raises a bit of a problem I have with all this ”consciousness” stuff. It often seems like philosophy, unlike every other science, seems to have an inverse Occam’s razor which states that the more convoluted and weird a theory of consciousness is, the more valid it becomes. I mean, there’s people who seriously consider the notion that we may all be components of some vast (literal) computer simulation. Or that no-one else really exists except you. Or me. The observer. Whatever.

I think you can follow this stuff to the nth degree without getting anywhere useful. The bottom line is we bloody well are conscious, my subjective experience of the world is probably pretty similar to yours and we might as well just live with it and get on with the much more interesting business of how it works.

Or, to put it another way: I could probably form an ironclad academic argument that “feet” are an illusion and that every other being in my life has an entirely alien experience of the world and an entirely different notion of what “legs” are; it wouldn’t stop me borrowing socks from my housemates when I forget to do the laundry.

In which Dawkins discusses how early replicators acquired themselves “survival machines” to “protect” them from other replicators, and, eventually move them around using legs, wings, fins and similar. He also suggests the origins of imagination, and, possibly, consciousness.

p59: Imagination as a threat-prediction mechanism. This is an interesting, and plausible idea. Once early brains could map their environment, the ability to pre-empt the movements of predators in that environment would be a useful mutation. From there it’s not a great stretch to imagine (ha!) how that ability could complexify into imagination as we know it.

p65: Communication & lying: indivisible? When a system of communication develops, those who abuse it can potentially gain an advantage. The example given here is a bird call which warns of a nearby predator. If a flock of birds is feeding and one of them makes this call, the flock flies away to safety. However, if there is no predator and an individual makes this call, it is free to eat as much food as it likes – its flock of competition has taken the call seriously and flown away. Interesting idea.

Overall Notes:Dawkins paints a picture of early brains being simple devices to fire off a sequence of muscular contractions on response to simple input – say, the sound of a nearby predator. Jacquard looms for nerve firing sequences. Is there a link to Straw Dogs and the Libet experiments here: the idea that most human behaviour being blind, unconscious reaction?

***

I can’t help but feel here that there’s a possible argument for conscious life being the inevitable upshot of replicators, maybe even complex chemistry itself.

If I understand the argument correctly, single-celled organisms are the result of the same mindless replication/mutation/accretion of useful traits that brought about complex replicators in the first place. Therefore, complex organisms are a product of the same process (pp46-47).

A similar process could be said to have been at work in the rise of consciousness. A central controller of muscle contraction gains sensory response and memory, which evolves into spatial awareness and threat prediction and consciousness arrives at the point where a being factors itself into that spatial map of its environment (pp58-59). This all follows in the same mindless, logically inevitable track.

So, chemistry gives rise to replication, replication gives rise to organisms which gain an evolutionary edge through locomotion and its control, locomotive control is made more useful by memory and sensory awareness, consciousness happens as spatial awareness arises and becomes more complex.

I’m reminded of a podcast I listened a while ago with Rudy Rucker, who was channeling the ideas of Stephen Wolfram. Specifically, the idea of evolution as a self-organising process, rather than a fizzing battle of mutation. More here (skip to the paragraph entitled “An Abundance of Insights”).

I’m simplifying slightly here because it’s late and I’m tired, but I’m pretty sure the base argument is sound. Of course, there’s no reason to assume the resultant consciousness would be anything like ours.

It’s the morning now, I’ve had some sleep, and all this looks a lot more shaky. However, I’m leaving it here becuase I think it’s got some merit, just probably shouldn’t be taken totally seriously…

***

There’s also links here to Ramachandaran’s qualia, which I’ve blogged about previously: the different stages of the evolution of consciousness could be likened to the different stages of qualia.

Finally, Dawkins makes an interesting suggestion in the chapter endnotes that serial, narrative consciousness as we know it is an illusion, produced as a side-effect of that consciousness arising through this “world+me” model of awareness. He makes the argument that the underlying processes of the brain are much more “parallel” in nature (a number of stimulus/responses operating simultaneously), and the linear way we experience the world is an abstraction, designed to make all that input managaeable.

In which Dawkins discusses further what happens during replication, how best to define a ‘gene’ or ‘chromosome’ and how inheritance and selection works.

p28: The structure of a cistron, with its beginning and end markers, will be familiar to anyone who’s studied prehistoric computing theory: files were often stored on magnetic tape in this way, one after another with beginning and end delimiters. Not that I think this observation is any more relevant than that; there’s a limited number of ways you can store information in a 2d array. Interesting parallel though.

p29: If the whole purpose of an organism is to preserve the genetic units held within it, why do we see a selection for sexual reproduction, complete with the crossing over that potentially breaks up and corrupts those genetic units?

p45: If the only purpose of DNA is to survive, then surely the ‘large fraction [which] is never translated into protein’ (and therefore useless to its host organism), is simply explained by its own existence?

Overall notes:

• Genes which give their host a survival advantage are more likely to survive themselves.

Conversely

• Genes which give their host a disadvantage are more likely to die out with their host

At least, those which manifest before reproduction.

• Tendency when we die when we do caused by accumulation in the gene pool of genes which cause us to die at around 80? What if we only reproduced after (say) 60?

Note on review: Doesn’t reproduction as it stands now seem a very inefficient way of propagating a gene line? Especially in humans: it takes years to get to sexual maturity, then a period of fertility followed by a longish period of comparatively low reproductive value, especially when you factor in the menopause. Am I missing something here?

It would appear that I spoke a little to soon in October; shortly after making that post, I foolishly took on a freelance job which swiftly outgrew its allotted few weekends and took over my life till the end of the year.

However! I’m back again, and this time I’m not going to do anything stupid like taking on any more work outside of the day job. In addition to the todo list I outlined previously, I’ve been making some good headway with The Meme Machine, which is a much easier read than The Selfish Gene.

First things first though, onward with the notes backlog…

From Mind Hacks (which has an excellent accompanying blog):

The phi phenomenon [seems] to say something important about the relationship of real time to perceived time. If you show two flashing lights of different colours in order to induce the phi phenomenon, you still get an effect of apparent motion. For some people, the light appears to change from the first colour to the second as it moves from the first spot to the second spot.

Now, the thing about this is – how did your brain know what colour the light was going to change to? It seems as if what you “saw” (the light changing colour) was influenced by something you were about to see. Various theories have been put forward to explain this, either about the revision of our perceptions by what comes after or about the revision of our memories. Philosopher Daniel Dennet says that both of these types of theory are misleading because they both imply that conscious experience travels forward in time along a single, one-step-forward-at-a-time-and-no-steps-back track.

Instead, he suggests, there are multiple drafts of what is going on being continuously updated and revised. Within an editorial window (of, some have suggested, about 200 milliseconds of real time), any of these drafts can out-compete the others to become what we experience.

and

There’s that number again: 100-200 ms! It occurs all over this book, and I think this may be the root of it; the commonly found window for conscious experience may be this size because of the uncertainty introduced by the delay between our senses and reactions. So this is the range over which our brain has developed the ability to predict, by simulation, the outcome of our actions.

I’m off on holiday for a week now, more when I get back.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here; it’s not through lack of interest (I continue to talk my friends’ ears off about this stuff, given half the chance), rather my life being totally taken over by work for the last month or two. Now that particular project‘s out of the way though, I’m free to plough my spare time back into geeky side-projects. Hurrah!

Coming attractions:

• Write up of the Daniel Dennett video that’s been languishing in the linklog for a while.
• More of the Selfish Gene notes & musings. I’ve been getting a bit bogged down in the actual reading of it though, so once I’ve cleared the backlog of notes, I might start skimming through for interesting bits in a thoroughly slapdash and cavalier way.
• More writers. A few of the people I’ve talked to recently have interesting and relevant takes on the kinds of things I cover (or intend to cover) here, so I’m hoping to get them to contribute.
• The Meme Machine. I’ve bought a copy of this book from the ‘zon, and it’s in my pile to attack after I’ve seen off the Selfish Gene.

Watch this space!