Robert Scantlebury – July 1991
That Just About Wraps It Up For God
I wrote the first draft of this essay in longhand between 9 June
and 19 June 1991. This second draft is
the first fair copy of it, which I have written mainly so that it can be
reviewed (my writing is somewhat difficult to read). The text of the essay is more or less as per the first draft,
with some typographical and stylistic changes.
However, its structure has been radically changed, particularly Part 2,
in order to present my ideas in what is, I think, a more logical order. This has necessitated some rewriting where
the flow of the piece would have been disjointed otherwise, and also the
insertion of many new sections - the word count just keeps getting higher!
Another note on the style of this essay. I have deliberately avoided references to any modern work, although
in many cases it is clear that I am basing my ideas on such work, and it may
even be clear to the reader which works and authors these are. There are a number of reasons for this: I
wrote the whole thing off the top of my head and didn't look anything up (apart
from how to spell Nietzsche!), so to keep it consistent I didn't include
references; I do not regard this essay as an academic work, and I find the
abundance of footnotes and references in such works as clutter which gets in
the way of a clear presentation of ideas; good ideas stand on there own without
the support of a famous name; finally, there are two possible books that I
could turn this essay into - a short one, say 50,000 words without references
(but a list of 'further reading') - and
a long one, 100,000 words plus, with references and quotes galore, which would
require a lot more work, which I don't want to do now and delay review.
In this second draft I have tried to shape the essay into a
bookish form, but this is not a fixed form, and it may even be better to write
the book from scratch using a totally different structure - I'm open to
suggestions. But there are two
questions I am keen to have answered: Are these good ideas? and Have I put them well? If the answer to both of these is YES, then
I need no encouragement to write the book.
If the answer to either is NO, then can anything be done about it?
If this strikes you as a damned silly way to write a book about
anything, you'll have to let me know what you would have done - as for me, I'm
just making it up as I go along!
Bob Scantlebury, July 1991
This 'impromptu' essay expands my ideas on philosophy as they
apply to humans and the universe these creatures ('we') seem to me to
inhabit. It is by way of an outline and
is somewhat dogmatic and terse, since its purpose is to serve as the basis of a
more detailed working out later, in book form.
In Part 1 I introduce the themes which will recur in later Parts
and relate these themes to the the central one of understanding what Man is,
who we are, and what it is to be human.
Part 1 is about Man today, what sort of state we are in, how we
got here, and how we might do something about it. It concentrates on the human race, rather than the individual
person, this being the subject of Part 2, which is mainly about babies. Part 3 is an excursion into the origins of
Man, and therefore of each of us, as explained by evolution and genetics.
Part 4 is an attempt to explain the conclusions reached in Part 2
in terms of evolution, specifically the evolution of the mind. In conclusion, I speculate upon the
potential ramifications of this explanation.
Note: I use the word 'human' rather than
'man' to avoid seeming sexist, but I shall most often say 'we'. When I use 'Man' I wish to evoke its
classical sense. When discussing the
human infant I will use the term 'he' for convenience, to distinguish the child
from the mother, 'she', who is invariably female.
It seems that certain questions are amenable to 'scientific'
investigation, and others are not.
Their was once a branch of philosophy called 'Natural Philosophy', the
philosophy of Nature, which has disappeared today; its role has been taken over
by what we call 'Science'. What remains,
the rest of philosophy, concerns those questions which science appears to be
unable to answer. Why not? If science cannot answer these questions,
are they therefore unanswerable? Is a
question which cannot be answered a question at all, or is it just
nonsense? With the advent of science,
what remains for philosophy to do? Is
science a branch of philosophy, or philosophy a branch of science, or are they
quite separate disciplines, or do they 'overlap'? Why am I asking these questions?
I can only answer the last question: I'm pointing out that the
division between science and philosophy is arbitrary, or at least that there is
no agreement as to what the division should be. And there is no consensus as to what the answers to the first few
questions should be. As a fervent
adherent of both disciplines, I most often find myself wandering about in the
murky area between the two. To a 'pure'
scientist, this habit fairly and squarely brands me a 'philosopher' since pure
science is about facts, observations, experiments, theories which can be
tested, ideas which are useful, meaningful propositions, and so on. It is not about a lot of airy-fairy
speculative nonsense, or systems of pure ideas, or trying to find questions we
can't answer, or trying to undermine the very basis of everything we believe
in. I find this attitude somewhat
blinkered. To a 'pure' philosopher, my
love for science might also seem suspect, because science is incomplete; it can
only supply half the answers since it deals with the 'outside world', the
empirical world, and has almost nothing to say about the 'inside world', about
Man. I have more sympathy with this
viewpoint, but I hope its wrong. I say
this because if its right, then some questions are genuinely unanswerable, and
I'd like to think they're not.
Interestingly, there is one academic discipline which also
straddles the border between science and philosophy, and between the inside and
the outside worlds; Mathematics. I note
this in passing and shall have no more to say on it here.
It seems to me that the 'inside world' is just as amenable to
scientific investigation as anything else.
We have already made a few stabs at it: animal behaviour, psychology,
neurology, psychiatry, linguistics, logic, and so on. There are also the so called humanities: history, geography,
sociology, anthropology, and so on; but these fields deal with large numbers of
people, and I think we should try to understand individuals first, and groups
later. The proper study of Man is Man
himself. And the best is example we
each have of Man is ourselves.
Here is the nub of the problem: self reference. How can the subject of an investigation also
be the investigator? Surely there will
be a 'conflict of interest'? We will
only reveal to ourselves the things we want ourselves to know! And we are
unlikely to agree to the performing of experiments upon ourselves. Similar arguments hold (in a free society)
with regard to the collection of data from other individuals. For these reasons the study of Man has
proceeded fitfully at best, and many of our ideas about ourselves are based
upon almost anecdotal evidence, or superstition, or myth.
The approach I have adopted is to gather information from as many
fields as possible which deal with individual humans, and particularly with how
they interact with the world, and to try to relate this information with my own
experience. Over the years, a pattern
has emerged; and it is this pattern I shall be discussing here. There are a number of key features which I
can spell out now in order to make understanding the main text easier.
Man is an animal, a 'super-ape', a species which has evolved on
Earth just as all species have, from out of the 'primordial soup' which covered
the planet billions of years ago. To
understand Man as animal we must study Biology, Zoology, and animal
behaviour. The 'secrets' of Man lie in
his origins, and the secrets of each individual lie in his or her origins. Complexity increases with time, so the
further back in time one goes, the simpler things become. To understand the complexity, start with the
simple origins, run the film forward slowly, and incorporate the complexity
piece by piece as it arises. This is
what one does in order to understand Man as individuals; the study of
Psychology. Only when we have a grasp
of the basics, Man as animal and as individual, can we go on to look at
'modern' Man: civilisation, culture, art, religion, society, politics and so
on.
This is the broad plan I have followed
herein.
The term 'human condition' implies that there is some attribute
characteristic of humans, some 'state of being', which distinguishes them from
other creatures. We do not use the
terms 'life condition', 'animal condition', or 'mammal condition' (though we
presumably experience these states too) because the attribute is peculiar to
humans, we uniquely possess it. What is
this attribute? There are several
aspects to it, but central to our condition is our awareness of our existence,
and of our predicament, and our unceasing quest to explain and control our
lives. In other words we are (fully)
conscious, and we never stop asking questions.
But what is consciousness, and what is it to be conscious?
These are deep questions, about which whole books could be
written. For my current purposes,
though, I propose to use a working definition of consciousness which is, I
hope, not too far from what most people would assume consciousness to be. A human being, and indeed any animal, is
conscious insofar as it is able to 'record' experiences and feelings which it
is then able to use, in some way, to cope with life. On this definition, consciousness alone is not sufficient to
distinguish humans from higher animals, which are in all probability just as
aware (in terms of recording experience) as we are.
The extra element possessed by humans is that they are supremely
capable of using the information they record to, as I have put it, 'cope with
life'. They don't just record naked
experience, they try to structure it, to ask questions about it, to use it to
predict future events and to solve problems.
This ability is usually given the name 'intelligence', and humans
possess this to a degree not even approached other animals. Our intelligence supports our prodigious
abilities, to use tools to shape our environment, and to use language to build
and maintain complex societies.
But whilst most people would agree that humans are conscious and
intelligent, they imply a lot more than this by the phrase 'human condition';
they imply that tragedy and pain are fundamental to us, that in some way this
is the price we pay for out gifts, that to be human is to 'know too much', and
that this knowledge is dangerous and unbearable.
Perhaps it is not that we know too much but that we know too
little. Though blessed with
intelligence, we are also cursed with insatiable curiosity. We want to know, and we want to know the
truth - we are not interested in wild guesses, or half answers, or
incomprehensible theories. There are periods
in our lives during which we seem to be happy, 'without a care in the world',
enjoying life. Sometimes these periods
last a lifetime, but more often they last a few years, or even a few days -
some people never have them at all. At
the end of one of these interludes, we often conclude that we were just kidding
ourselves, that we were really living in a fool's paradise, in blissful
ignorance, and that life is actually hell.
Life's a bitch, and then you die.
There seem to be two fundamentally opposing viewpoints. One is that there is an Answer, if only we
could find it. The other is that this
is just a con, something for us to strive for, something to do so we don't just
end it all now. Adherents of the Answer
follow religion or mysticism or humanist doctrines. The other camp contains pessimists, sceptics, pragmatists,
realists, or whatever name they wish to adopt who have resigned themselves to
living without an Answer, and adjusted their attitudes to cope. Many people seem to swing from one camp to
the other depending what day of the week it is, what hat they have on, or what
their horoscope says.
What is to be made of all this?
They can't all be right, can they?
Surely, either one camp is right, or neither camp is? If neither then what do we do? It is to get a grip on these questions that
the discipline of Philosophy has arisen, though it can't necessarily always
provide an answer.
One way to look at it is that philosophy is an attempt to address
the question 'What's Happening?'.
Whilst a large part of this endeavour has been taken over by the
disciplines we call Science, we still turn to philosophy to supply us with the
'ground rules' and to answer some of the more difficult and personal
questions. I believe that each of us is
a philosopher, and the time at which we really do answer our difficult
questions is the time we first ask them: when we are born. It is to this person, the Newborn, that
philosophers should address their questions, both to find out what the 'true'
answers are, and to find out why it is that philosophy has so far not come up
with these answers.
There is an unfortunate tendency in our societies for one person
or type of person to set themselves up as somehow 'better' than another person
or type of person. This happens
whenever some luckless individual, for whatever reason, needs help or
assistance in any way. Suddenly there
is a polarization - the Helper and the Helped; the Can-Do and the
Can't-Do. There are many examples:
Doctor and Patient, Teacher and Pupil, Expert and Layman, Preacher and Flock,
Parent and Child. When someone adopts
this 'better than' attitude, we say they are 'patronizing'; acting as if they
were the father. But actually, both
father and mother are also being patronizing (in its negative sense) towards
their children, and it is no more 'right' for them to be so than it is for the
Helper to patronize the Helped. I
believe that this attitude, 'I know best - you need to be helped', is a great
sickness in our societies and is the cause of much misery and strife. I will not pursue the point, though, except
in the case of philosophers.
Just as parents imagine they know better than the children, so
philosophers think they know better than the rest of us, at least about philosophy. They would think it quite absurd if one were
to suggest that the primitive ideas in the unformed mind of a baby of but a few
months old were as valid as their own massive and profound theories concerning
the meaning of life, the nature of reality and the existence of God, of Good
and of Evil. But I think that the
baby's ideas are not only as valid, they are in many ways more valid, more
profound and a good deal more 'true' (whatever that might mean) than the reams
of verbiage churned out by philosophers.
It is easy to see how the patronizing attitude of philosophers
arose, grounded as it is in the attitude of the parents towards their
children. Clearly, the newborn infant
is completely helpless; he does need help.
But this is not accidental; it is not a mistake that nature has somehow
made, that we are born 'too soon', before we are ready for life. The relationship of the caring parent and
the helpless infant has evolved over millennia because it is the best way (or
rather the 'optimal' way) for humans to learn and to be adaptable. The adaptability of humans to the countless
possible situations and environments that they might encounter is the chief
reason for their success and the dominance they currently enjoy over the rest
of the animal kingdom. I discuss this
in more detail elsewhere. The point I'm
trying to make here is this: if the human infant was born more 'ready' than he
is, in other words with a more extensive set of built in behaviour patterns or
instincts (just as insects and birds have), then he would be less adaptable,
the period of learning he had to go through would be shorter, his brain
wouldn't need to be as large, and he wouldn't be as intelligent and successful
as he actually is. In fact, he wouldn't
be human. It is the essence of being
human to be born totally helpless, and to have to find one's own way in the
world.
Of course, it is less than true to say that the infant is 'totally
helpless'. Nature has provided a
wondrous thing to help the Newborn: 'Maternal Instinct'. The mother loves the baby and will do
everything in her power to protect and care for it. In a sense, the mother is the slave of the child, which is quite
the reverse of the Helper-Helped relationship.
The father too is enslaved, though for purely biological reasons
(because he hasn't had to carry and give birth to the child), the father's
feelings are not as powerful as the mother's.
In a 'healthy' family (I explain elsewhere what I mean by this) the
father has some 'maternal instinct' too (I think 'maternal' is the right word
here because his desire to care for the child derives from his feminine nature
- the 'paternal instinct' is something else again, which I discuss
elsewhere). Both parents are enslaved
to the child. Depending again upon the
'health' of the family, this enslavement can be all too obvious, and one or
other of the parents may try to break free - many marriages seem to fail when
the couple has children. But parents
can counter their feelings of thralldom by simply enjoying the child - it is
cute and funny and helpless (some of the time) and as it develops a personality
it can become a source of delight and wonder.
Rather less laudably, parents can rationalise their role using what you
might call the 'Victorian' attitude. To
cope with the negative feelings engendered by parenthood, they adopt the role
of the Helper, the Guide, the Keeper (and so on) of the 'helpless', 'ignorant',
'immature', 'un-ready', 'incapable' child.
This is the patronizing attitude I am critical of - it may be a
palliative, but I think it is wrong.
What seems to happen, from the child's point of view, is
this. The infant initially tries to
make sense of things on its own. It has
no choice but to do so since its ability to communicate with its mother is very
limited. At this stage, the child makes
some very fundamental decisions about 'reality', life, and his place in
it. Later, when he acquires language,
he realises that a quick way to a better understanding is to ask lots of
questions. He does this, and the
parents dutifully answer as best they can, but they have to stop answering
sometime out of embarrassment, ignorance, tiredness or because they think its
better that the child doesn't know.
Depending upon exactly how the parents handle this problem, they can be
more or less patronizing about it.
Inevitably, there remain questions (usually the more important ones)
which the child never gets answered to his satisfaction. He doesn't worry too much about this because
he knows he will find out about these things one day, when he is 'old enough to
understand' or when he 'grows up'. In
later life, depending upon several factors which one can summarise as how
curious the individual is, he may put aside his burning questions, or he may
accept answers from some authority figure (teacher, doctor, vicar), or he may
find his answers in books (the Bible, an encyclopaedia, philosophy books), or
he may remain unsatisfied, still seeking answers to his questions. Another way that people can end up being
dissatisfied is that they initially accept some set of answers but later become
disillusioned with them, perhaps as the result of some powerful emotional
experience. The dissatisfied continue
their search for 'truth' in adult life and become philosophers or theologians.
As adults, philosophers spend a great deal of time and effort
reading about, writing about, thinking about and talking about these questions
and their putative answers. They are
perhaps entitled to say that they have a much better grasp of the issues
involved, a deeper understanding than the 'man in the street', and certainly
than the newborn baby! (After all, it is because they couldn't answer these
questions themselves as babies that they still pursue them now.) But for all
their vast 'knowledge' and plethora of ideas, the answers they give to these
questions are not ultimately based upon any rational set of precepts or upon
direct evidence, as Science demands. All
they can do is to assert their beliefs, holding to them not by dint of reason
but from sheer faith.
Their faith is rooted, I believe, in the ideas formed in the
dawning mind of the newborn child that they once were, the very same being
towards which they now adopt such a condescending and patronizing
attitude. For this reason, they must
throw away their superior attitude and address the Newborn on equal terms. The world of the Newborn is a world without
words, a world of pure images and ideas.
Partly because of this, it is also an unconscious world. It seems that it is only when we acquire
language, and are able to 'tag' our ideas with words, that we have access to
our own minds and have conscious thoughts.
But the words we use, the beliefs we express, are themselves based upon
ideas created by the Newborn, upon wordless, unconscious beliefs. When asked 'why do you believe that?' we
are, if we are honest, likely to say 'I don't know - I just do' or 'it seems
right to me'.
It is as if the mind were composed of two parts: the primary part
created by the Newborn and hence more fundamental, wordless and unconscious,
the source of faith and belief; the other part created later out of language,
founded upon the ideas created by the primary part and hence secondary to it. An explanation of the dual nature of the
mind is one of my major concerns. There
are many labels one could attach to these two aspects of mind, and I will refer
to them both by a variety of names according to context. But the main names I will use refer to what
I believe the main function of each of the faculties is. The function of the fundamental, wordless,
unconscious faculty seems to be to decided what to believe in, to discern
'Truth' - lets call this faculty 'Intuition'.
The function of the conscious, language based faculty seems to be to
'sort things out', to give labels to things and to describe their relationships
to each other - lets call this faculty 'Reason'.
One of the difficulties with philosophy and with human affairs
generally, particularly in the modern materialistic and technological world, is
that Reason has been given far too much importance, far too much to do; more
than it can actually bear. Before going
on to look at Intuition, I want to suggest how Reason, in the guise of Science,
dominates modern thinking.
Science and Technology have been spectacularly successful over the
past few hundred years in increasing the standard of living of most people in
the Western World. Its achievements in
the Third World, however, are so far somewhat less impressive. The basis of this success is the triumph of
Reason, the application of scepticism and rigour, the need for proof and
clarity. The cause was championed by
philosophers and early 'scientists' (such as Descartes, Voltaire, Newton and
others) and led to that great flowering of knowledge known as the
Enlightenment. Hitherto, knowledge had
been meted out by the Church which interpreted the work of Plato and Aristotle
done 2,000 years previously. A lot of
this ancient 'knowledge' was simply wrong, and it was probably about time it
was debunked. But somewhere along the
way they threw the baby out with the bath-water.
Science explains a lot, but it doesn't explain everything. Technology provides a lot but it doesn't
provide everything. The dividing line,
after which science becomes inarticulate, seems to be between non-human and
human affairs. Physics, Chemistry and
Biology are easy meat, but Man is orders of magnitude more difficult to
explain. The reason for this is that we
are probably the most complex phenomenon that is currently known about. Another is that experimenting upon living
humans is not permitted in our society, so it is impossible to get reliable
data from which to develop theories. A
third is that a system studying itself, Man studying Man, throws up a whole
host of problems.
The majority of the worlds problems concern the activities of
Man. Without us all it would have to
contend with would be natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and
volcanoes, which it has been happily coping with for billions of years. Most of Man's problems concern Man too, the
abuse of Man's power, the rape of the Earth, war and despotism. If we could understand Man that would be
half the battle. But science is almost
mute on the subject. We have nowhere to
turn to but the other disciplines, ones in which Reason plays little part and
emotion takes over; the heart rules the head.
If not a recipe for disaster this is certainly a recipe for confusion,
which is exactly what we've got.
If Reason is not the answer, perhaps the
place to look is not to lower our sights toward emotional solutions, but to
raise them toward a faculty greater than Reason?
The idea of raising one's sights rather than lowering them is not
a new one. History is full of instances
of individuals and peoples who decided that they were capable of better things,
destined for greatness, meant to do change the world. Such instances were the birth of Empires, usually short lived, or
the birth of Religions, which still survive.
It is probably a question of where one's eyes come to rest when
one looks up. If they alight upon one's
reflection, one becomes the instrument of greatness oneself, which happened to
Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler. If
their gaze turns to the sky, one posits a God, something greater outside
oneself, which inspired Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed; the great figures of
Western religions. If one's eyes rest
upon Nature, upon Creation one becomes a Pantheist. If they rest on one's neighbour, one becomes a Humanist. If they rest on nothing in particular, but
encompass everything, Man and Nature, one becomes an adherent of the Eastern
tradition: Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao.
These instances are rare (though they are probably more common than
history records), but a successful leader or founder is one who has a vision
and is able to communicate that vision to the people, his followers; they come
to believe in the leader. This is only
possible if each of us actually has a 'spark of greatness' within us, waiting
to be kindled. The sense of there being
'something greater' is a sense we all share; it is the desire to have a cause,
a purpose, a meaning, something to believe in, for there to be an Answer. It seems to me that it was this was the baby
that the Enlightenment threw out with the bath-water of religious
indoctrination. Perhaps they thought
that God could manage on His own without the doctrines, or that Reason would
somehow support God in the stead of dogma.
The Church clearly perceived otherwise, which was why they took a hard
line with the likes of Galileo. But for
better or worse, Reason won the day, and why not? After all Galileo was right, wasn't he? Yes - but that's not the point.
By destroying the edifice created by the Church, the Enlightenment
knocked God's legs from under him. If
He didn't stand upon this rock, where did He stand?
For many people, the need for God (for an Answer), was greater
than any need to explain His existence using the new fangled and suspect power
of Reason. But philosophers, who had
been preserving Reason since the days of the Greeks, redoubled their efforts to
employ it to prove that He existed.
There were some notable near misses, but ultimately they failed;
probably because it can't be done. Ironically,
their efforts to establish beyond doubt that God was real worked against them,
since what they actually did establish was that God and Reason are
incompatible. This was the nail in the
coffin for many (notably Nietzsche who proclaimed 'God is dead' over the
roof-tops via his alter ego, Zarathrustra), and as Reason accumulated success
after success (the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, steam,
electricity, medicine, IT) it gradually became less and less fashionable or
credible to try to hold that both Reason and God could exist together.
The only way out, it seems, is to assume that God exists 'outside'
Reason, or above it; that there are 'levels of explanation'. In this scheme, Reason is not the ultimate
or highest level of explanation, there is a greater one. There are weak versions of this doctrine,
and strong ones, roughly corresponding to the Western viewpoint and the Eastern
one. The Western or weak version
replaces Reason by Faith. A pure
'Fideist' rejects all attempts to use Reason to support God, and when asked why
he believes in Him, says 'I just do.' It is an article of Faith. The Eastern version is stronger (and more
difficult) and replaces Reason with Knowledge.
This is not ordinary knowledge, accumulated from outside oneself using
the faculty of Reason, but inner knowledge, achieved through meditation, which
is true Knowledge and not the flimsy stuff based on the disinformation which
our senses give to us. The Eastern Answer
is not usually referred to as God, since It differs in outward appearance to
our Western 'old man in the sky' tradition, but It occupies the same position;
Number One.
As I have already intimated, my own position is that the faculty I
call Intuition is indeed 'greater' than the faculty of Reason, and that Faith
and Knowledge are aspects of Intuition.
On this basis, believers, East or West, hold their beliefs
'Intuitively'. All they are really
saying is that their belief 'works for them', and this is one definition of
truth; what works. It is not the same
as Truth, absolute truth, which would work for everyone (though presumably
believers imagine that their 'truth' would work for everyone if only they
believed it!). The idea of 'relative
truth' is a problem I address elsewhere.
Intuition itself is not the Answer, of
course, it is merely that it is Intuition which will 'guide' the search for the
Answer, and will tell us how close we are to it. It is for this function, the Guide, which many people attempt to
employ Reason, but in vain. All Reason
can do is suggest answers, to shuffle data, to play with words, to deal the
pack until we get the 'right hand'.
This work is my version of the ideal hand.
Where did we come from?
Were we created by God? If so
are we all descended from Adam and Eve?
For a long time, this seemed to be the only explanation. But two hundred years or so ago, geological
evidence, particularly fossils, seemed to suggest that the Earth was incredibly
ancient and that many prehistoric animals had existed that were now
extinct. It was argued that successive
generations of animals might gradually change, develop new features and habits,
until a species actually changed into several different species, rather like
the many breeds of dog that had been produced.
Perhaps all species had 'evolved' in this way, including Man, from a
common origin many millions of years ago.
Darwin developed a theory of 'natural selection' which provided a
mechanism for evolution, and Mendel founded the theory of genetics which
explained the mechanism of heredity. Today genetic evolution is the orthodox
scientific theory which accounts for the development of life on Earth from a
common origin 3 billion years ago.
People still argue about the details, and speculate as to what the
common origin, The Origin of Life, might be.
But it is generally accepted that Man is an animal which developed out
of ape-like creatures (from which modern apes also developed) just a few
million years ago by a process of evolution.
Modern Man first appeared some tens of thousands of years ago, and much
evidence exists as to the way we used to live and the way our modern
civilisation arose.
By 'Modern Man' I mean us, our species, people identical to us in
every way and with which, if time travel were possible, 20th century
individuals could breed. We have not
evolved at all in 50,000 years. 'Stone
Age Man' had physical and mental equipment identical to ours - they were just
as able and clever as we are. Clearly
their life style was very different, though.
They lived in small groups or tribes and were nomadic, wandering the
plains in search of new food supplies, sleeping under the stars. Being relatively poor runners they used
their wits rather than speed to hunt prey and to escape predators. Until they discovered fire and stone tools,
their behaviour would have been unremarkable, just another kind of ape, eeking
out an existence, scraping by. So what
happened in the last 50,000 years to turn these apes into us?
To understand Man one must first understand how the 'animal' came
to be, and second how that animal developed into us, how we developed our
civilisation. The second question is
the more difficult, but clues to it are contained in the answer to the first,
and that is that the human animal developed by evolution. Lets have a look at this human animal.
Human beings are conscious and intelligent organisms, capable of
asking questions. How do these
attributes distinguish them from the other life-forms found on Earth? Take consciousness, the ability to record
experience, first. Plants and lower
animals are excluded from this attribute since they do not record experience at
all, they are not capable of learning.
In fact, they don't have to learn: plants don't do anything, they just
sit there and take whatever comes; micro-organisms, worms, insects and fish
don't learn how to behave, they are 'programmed' from birth by instincts which
govern every aspect of their lives.
There are one or two exceptions to this general rule, but I don't want
to go into detail here - suffice it to say that some 'lower' animals exhibit
learning of a mechanical kind which does not involve consciousness. Amphibians and reptiles probably do a little
learning, judging from the size of their brains, but just how much I don't
know. I'm not sure that anybody does,
since they don't appear to be anyone's favourite experimental subject. Birds seem to be a judicious mixture of instinct
and learning; for instance bird-song is a learned behaviour pattern but nest
building is instinctive. But instinct
predominates.
Only when we get to mammals (warm blooded animals with fur which
do not lay eggs but bear the embryo in a womb and which later suckle their
young) do we encounter a class of animals for which learning as opposed to
instinct plays a major role in controlling behaviour. Mammalian infants, from mice to cats to humans, go through a
special phase of growth from birth to maturity during which they acquire all
the knowledge they will need to deal with the problems of survival within their
particular ecological niche. This phase
is quite distinct from the larval stage of insect growth or the short period of
juvenile growth in fish and reptiles, during which the main preoccupation of
the young creature is to increase in size.
The distinction is that young mammals are laying down behaviour
patterns, learning. Their behaviour as
infants is very different from their behaviour as adults and they need the
protection and care of their parents for the whole of the period just to
survive it. Of all mammals, humans go
through the longest period of learning - between 10 and 20 years (allowing for
individual variation and the arbitrary nature of when a person can be said to
have 'grown up'). Why does it take so
long? Because, in a sense, we have to
learn everything! When we are born we have almost no instinctive behaviour at
all, apart from a few reflexes like crying and sucking. We are 'totally helpless', the essence of
the 'human condition'. True, we have
urges and drives for food and comfort and later for sex and defending territory
and so on, but we have no idea how we are going to satisfy our desires. Having no inborn methods, we have to learn
how, and it takes a long time.
Clearly we humans have been spectacularly successful at 'learning
how'. This success is due to many
factors, which I won't go into in any detail save to list them. The main advantage of learning over instinct
is that it makes us exceedingly adaptable to changes in our circumstance such
as climate and terrain; it gives us a wide variety of possible niches and
strategies to use whereas the instinctive creature is tied to a particular
habit and habitat. We also live in
large groups which permit each of us to adopt and specialise in a particular
social role, such as farming, hunting, defending or child rearing. This allows the development of a 'social
machine' which easily dominates the disorganised competition (in other words
all the other species) in the fight for food, water and space. We have developed language by which we can
pass on experience and instruction to other group members, and written language
which allows a permanent record to be made for succeeding generations. We have inquiring and creative minds (this
being an absolute requirement for the human child which has to make sense of
and ultimately find his way in the world), and this nature, when it extends
beyond the day to day exigencies of existence and beyond childhood into adult
pursuits, has lead us to research into the fundamental principles of the
universe, and given us the science and technology with which we currently
control our environment.
What is learning? One way
to look at it is as the acquisition of a set of ideas or hypotheses about the
world which together constitute an interrelated set or model. As new experiences are incorporated into the
model, new hypotheses are formed and the model is modified. The model is used to predict possible
outcomes for various possible behaviours of the growing organism. When the model works, correct outcomes are
predicted and the accuracy of the model is confirmed. When the predicted outcome does not occur, it may be that the
model requires modification. In
general, the organism behaves so as to bring about certain conditions (the
satisfaction of desires) and predicts that such and such a behaviour will bring
about those conditions. How successful
an organism is is largely determined by how good its model is, how close to reality
the model is, at least in terms of the organism's current needs.
What I am describing here is what has come to be known as
'conditioning'. In simple terms, this
is just 'trial and error', 'reward and punishment'. For the growing human child, trying to comes to terms with the
world, to form a good model of it, to develop good ideas and working
hypotheses, conditioning is all important.
If the child is rewarded, by a parent or by success, the idea which led
to the given behaviour will be strengthened.
Conversely, if the child is punished, directly or else simply by
failure, an idea is weakened. It is not
an all or nothing phenomena, but in general ideas which always result in
failure are quickly abandoned, whereas ideas which work are held on to.
Conditioning has been used primarily as the explanation of
behaviour in animals, not as an explanation for the formation of ideas. But all I am proposing here is that animals,
which learn behaviour patterns by conditioning, must store these patterns in
their brains. It is these patterns
which I am calling 'ideas' or 'hypotheses', because that is what they are
called in humans. We have no evidence
that animals have ideas which are exactly like our own thoughts, but the more
intelligent of them do learn their behaviour, and they behave as if they had a
model of the world 'in their heads' which guides their actions. We can call the elements of such animal
models 'ideas', comparable to our own ideas.
I don't doubt that our models of the world are vastly more complex than
that of even the most intelligent animal (the current holder of this title
being the chimpanzee), and that our ideas are correspondingly more profound,
but in principle there is no difference.
The model exists to guide our behaviour; and the elements of it, the
individual hypotheses, are just 'ideas'.
I am labouring this point somewhat because there is a bone of
contention between so called 'Behaviourists' and their opponents as to what
goes on in the brains of animals, and therefore in our brains. It is, I believe, a common mistake made by
opponents to Behaviourism that Behaviourists think that what goes on in the
brain is somehow not important, or that it is un-knowable. In fact what Behaviourists are saying is
that the brain can be treated as a 'Black Box', that it simply isn't necessary
in order to explain behaviour to assume anything about how it works. Clearly, the brain is the organ of behaviour
- it records sensations, it learns, it causes the animal to respond appropriately
to certain stimuli and to complex situations.
Its functions are indeed important and complex. But Behaviourists are not interested in 'how
it works' but rather 'what it does'. If
they can explain complex behaviour by replacing the Black Box of the brain with
a model, and for this purpose the simpler the model the better, then they have
achieved their goal. The model based
upon conditioning as the learning mechanism is a start in that direction. They expect that as the experimental data
comes in, their model will become gradually more complex and
sophisticated. Perhaps it might even
explain all animal, or even all human behaviour, but that is a long way down
the line.
What Behaviourists are trying to do is tackle the problem of the
brain 'from the outside in', in other words from behaviour first to models
second. Traditionally, the problem has
been tackled (in humans) by psychologists, who proceed 'from the inside out';
by introspection, analysis (of others) and insight. This has only been partially successful in humans, and to extrapolate
from humans to animals (for which such direct investigation is not possible)
is, a Behaviourist would contend, dangerous and unscientific.
My position lies between the two extremes of behaviourism and
human psychology. I want to be able to
explain both human and animal behaviour by putting forward a theory of brain
functioning which accounts for the established tenets both of the Behaviourists
and the human psychologists. My theory
accounts for may other aspects of 'the human condition' too (philosophy,
mysticism, religion, art, science). It
is a way of seeing how we see things.
It is this theory that I am expounding
here. I have already mentioned some
aspects of it, namely the division of the mind between Intuition and Reason,
the brain as the organ of behaviour, the newborn child trying to come to grips
with the world by learning alone, and the essential similarity between how
animals learn and how humans learn - by forming models out of ideas and
hypotheses. A full exposition of the
theory must be postponed until Part 4 since it relies on a more detailed
discussion of human development (Part 2) and of the central role of evolution
in creating and shaping the body and mind of man (Part 3).
From the thumbnail sketch of Man that I have given so far, it is
clear that despite millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of
'civilization' and hundreds of years of technological growth, our vaunted human
greatness remains at odds with our humble origins. We are yet animals, with all the weaknesses and fears that they
possess, and it is for this reason that there is still a great deal of misery
in the world. Far from the problems
getting easier, they are getting harder, more pressing, more dangerous and more
difficult to solve. As the number of
humans increases, so does the number and variety and severity and complexity of
the conflicts between them and the many groups they habitually form. As the extent of our knowledge of the
physical world grows, and our power to control it increases, the answers to the
most fundamental questions of our existence still elude us. As our appetite for material possessions is
satisfied, so it increases; whilst our need for spiritual sustenance, denied
for the sake of materialism, remains unassuaged.
It would appear that Man is doomed to either destroy himself,
optionally taking the rest of the planet with him, or to forever remain at war
with himself, in every sense of the phrase.
This seems a rather pessimistic (a pessimist would no doubt say
'realistic') viewpoint, and it is not an opinion I share, although nothing I
have said so far appears to contradict it.
However, I am not a Utopian either: I don't believe that sometime soon
or perhaps in a few hundred or a few thousand years, all human beings will
suddenly become friends with each other and that peace and harmony will break
out everywhere and that a new Golden Age will dawn and last forever. What I do believe is that the greater is our
understanding, as individuals and as a race, of ourselves and of our
predicament, the less conflict there will be, and the more likely it will be
that the many problems besetting humanity today will be overcome.
This viewpoint is based upon another belief, that the root of our
problems is fear born out of ignorance, out of our inability to comprehend the
world, and that any increase in our comprehension will be for the better. This belief is founded upon faith, of
course, and it is beyond anyone's capacity to transmit faith by reason alone,
which is all I can do here (this is prose, not poetry). However, I can present that faith and invite
others to share it if they so wish. And
I can present a theory of human understanding which is as close to an
explanation of and a justification for a faith as any I have come across.
The core idea is that how successful we are as individuals and as
a race depends upon how well we answer the fundamental question 'What's
Happening?'. In other words, our
happiness depends upon how 'in touch with reality' we are. My thesis is that there is a single reality
and therefore a single answer to the question 'What's Happening?' - the closer
each individual gets to this 'right answer' the happier he will be, the more
successful will his life be. What is
true for each of us is true for all of us.
There is still a lot to explain though; that's why this work is
not just half a page starting 'The answer is...'. The difficulty seems to be that the concepts of 'the answer',
'right', 'happy', 'success' and so on seem to form a tight conceptual group, a
cluster of ideas, if you like, each dependant upon the others. Is there a way to break into this 'circle'
from the outside? Probably not; each
person must discover their own version of 'the answer' for themselves, from
inside the circle as it were. My hope
is that, since there is only one right answer, all our individual answers will
turn out to be fundamentally the same.
Perhaps I am contradicting myself, though. If what I want to say is self-defining and
circular and impossible to break into, how can I hope to explain it? Am I not saying, in effect, 'It is
impossible for me to explain my thesis to you, but I will now do so'? Well, yes; in a way. What I hope to impart is a sense of consistency,
balance, economy, elegance, beauty, in the hope that this will induce my
readers to think along the same lines and ultimately to arrive, by their own
means and in their own terms, at the same answer. Is it not the beauty of an idea which leads us to suspect that
idea to be true?
One thing I can't hope to do here is to actually answer the
question 'What's Happening?'. I
recommend a good encyclopaedia, if you want the details. What I can do, though, is to draw up a short
list of 'progress so far', and 'significant achievements' and to mark certain
items in the list as 'understandable errors'.
To do this I need to look at the way we humans, as individuals and in
groups, have tried to address the problem.
The evidence I shall use to support my case comes not from years of
research in the lab, archive or library, in a vast number of esoteric fields of
study, but simply from 'popular' accounts of orthodox theory in a few basic
scientific areas (mainly biology and psychology) which have appeared over the
past 25 years or so. The vast majority
of what I have to say is nothing new, but I think I can put these old ideas
together in a new way which leads to a simple but profound theory of
surprisingly great explanatory power.
So far all I have done is to set the
scene, to present the background and context of my ideas. Now I think its time to start on the
exposition of the theory. One should
always start at the beginning, of course; for the universe at large this is
with the Big Bang, for life in general it is with the Origin of Life, and for
individual humans it is with our birth, with the newborn infant about to
address themselves to the problem of the rest of their lives. To begin with I want to say more on why I
think that the place to look for the clues is at our own origin.
Most people would agree that turning a tiny helpless bundle of
flesh into an Einstein or a Newton is a process little short of
miraculous. Turning out a Joe Bloggs is
only slightly less miraculous, and even then, this is only so because the
experience is so common, and we take it for granted. In fact, its not just that it is common, its that it happens just
by itself. Nobody drew up a great plan
upon the birth of a new person which had scheduled within it each stage of
growth required, every experience needed, which lessons will be taught, and
which tests administered in order to create Einstein. Einstein just happened.
All that is required is that the child be kept physically healthy and mentally
stimulated and, other things being equal, it will become a saint.
But other things are never equal, and saints are very rare. We label these 'inequalities' in various
ways: fate, unfairness, circumstances, or bad luck. This is not the place to discuss all these influences upon the
child, which would in any case occupy a whole book in itself, but the fact that
'bad luck' happens is central to my theory, so I will survey the various
categories in which it comes.
The first bit of 'bad luck' to come our potential Einstein's way
is simply his body, in other words his genetic make-up; whatever he inherited
directly from his parents. It is
possible that he has some genetic disease, like haemophilia, or he may be
disabled, as with cerebral palsy. It may
simply be that he is unusually tall, or short, or attractive, or ugly; each of
these is a sort of handicap. Perhaps he
is physically whole but mentally abnormal in some way, in other words his brain
has developed differently. He could be
retarded or advanced (one can be too clever) or just simply different
(withdrawn, manic, weird). Even
supposing his mind and body start off 'normal', will his parents ensure that he
has exactly the right sort of environment to grow properly, in terms of food,
exercise and stimulation? For that
matter, what is the right environment?
Lets suppose our budding genius is always given the best of everything,
what is the chance that his parents (who will on average be ordinary people)
are perfect, are saints themselves? Almost
zero. They will have hang-ups, quirks,
mannerisms, affectations, sore points and fixed ideas just like everybody else,
and these 'sharp edges' are bound to affect the child in some way. In coping with the limitations of his
parents the child will be forced to limit himself. Finally, even with saints as parents, the future of the little
Einstein is not ensured: the world is a dangerous place, full of disease and
disaster and insidious influences (TV, drugs, crime, politics) which might lead
our hero into a dead-end. Looked at
like this it is a wonder that any of us ever achieve anything but a small
fraction of the potential we are born with, and that anyone even approaches it.
Most of the limitations we put on ourselves (in response to 'bad
luck') are simply mistakes we once made because we didn't know any better at
the time. As such, they can be
corrected or at least their effects can be ameliorated. This is the job of psychotherapists,
although they only usually get called in when a 'bad egg' is detected. They could be just as easily called in to
help the 'good eggs' to become even better eggs, and today some are. But this 'second stage' of recovery from the
'bad luck' of our early years, is often undertaken in terms of spiritual rather
than psychological growth. A
distinction is usually made between the soul and the mind, between the
'essence' and the bit that thinks. The
mind is perceived as an organ, like the liver, but the soul is somehow what we
are. As such it requires the
ministrations of a priest or a guru rather than a doctor to look after it.
It seems to me that there is no difference in kind between
psychological and spiritual growth - it is simply that what we call 'spiritual'
matters are somehow more fundamental to us.
I believe that this is because they relate to events that occurred very
early in our lives, such as being in the womb, being born, being suckled, and
so on.
I have said that certain early experience
amounts to 'bad luck', that we made 'mistakes' and that we 'limited
ourselves'. Why are all these ideas
about ourselves negative? Didn't we
have any positive ideas? Well, yes we
did - but they don't cause us any problems today. The point about the negative ideas is that we were denying
ourselves something which, in reality, we did not need to deny ourselves. At the time, we denied ourselves things for
the sake of expediency, we were desperately trying to cope and these limiting ideas
seemed to help in that coping. But
things change: we grow up, we become better able to cope, we free ourselves
from the daily bonds of the
family, the parents, we learn more about the world and about ourselves. The pity is that the early decisions we made
are so deeply held and so fundamental to us that we have great difficulty
letting go of them. This is a perfectly
understandable attitude, after all these ideas have helped and protected us for
most of our lives, they are a part of us, to dispense with them is like
chopping off an arm or a leg. The point
is though that the ideas were adopted to cope with a situation which no longer
exists, and that in the new situation, our adult life, they just get in the
way, they limit us. It is in this sense
that they are mistakes, and if we want to achieve what we are capable of, they
must be corrected.
Is there any bad luck that we as individuals can't really do
anything about? Perhaps it is our
genetic make-up. This really is fixed;
it is not a mistake so much as (potentially) a misfortune, and we had best
learn to live with it. But apart from
some severely disabling conditions, can you really call this sort of condition
'limiting'? Does it have any bearing at
all on whether you will lead a full, happy, successful and productive
life? For instance: you can't run 100m
in less than 10 seconds, or even 15 seconds.
So what? You can't do the Times
crossword in 10 minutes, or even at all.
So what? You can't answer all or
any of the questions in Mastermind. So
what? It is not these characteristics
themselves which are limiting, but the idea that for some reason you ought to
be something else; that you should have other skills or talents; that you are
in constant competition with other people and that only the winners gain
anything. I think these ideas are just
untrue; its not what you have, its what you do with it! Physical and mental attributes are
distributed randomly - some people get a great deal of an attribute, some get
none, but most get an average amount.
How much you personally get is just 'luck' and it is pointless to wish
you had more, you just have to accept things as they are.
Of course, there is a very fine line between accepting things as
they are and mistakenly assuming you do not have a talent which you do in fact
have; between being realistic and being fatalistic. This is probably the only way in which competition is a good
thing - a lot of people would otherwise settle for lower achievements than that
of which they are capable - at least competition would, for these people, bring
out the best in them. But the point is
that they can only do their best. There
will only be one winner, one best of all. But other things being equal, the
identity of the winner is just a matter of luck - he was born with the right
attributes! As long as everyone else in the competition did their best,
achieved their potential, then everyone was a winner. The only losers are those that gave up too soon.
One can imagine, by way of a thought experiment, a future date at
which the need for a traditional Olympic Games has vanished. Every new person would be assessed at birth;
scanned, measured and evaluated. Their
physique and intellect would be compared with past records (particularly with
past 'winners'), and by statistical means, the assessors could work out exactly
what each person will be capable of when they are adult, given the best
possible training. Being a statistical
thing, there would be a margin of error, but as the years passed and more data
was collected, this would grow smaller.
The 'Games' would then consist of each person competing not against
their opponents, but against their own personal standards. The old style 'winner' would be the one with
the highest standard, but no special praise would attach to him; everyone's
task would be equally difficult. Anyone
who achieved their personal standard would get a Gold Medal. On this measure, to get an Olympic Gold
Medal all one would have to do is simply one's very best - and that's all
anyone can do. In the distant future,
perhaps the games would be abandoned altogether since it would be taken for
granted that everyone would be doing their very best anyway.
Success, then, is nothing to do with how one 'measures up' against
anyone else's standards, or indeed any absolute standard, but is about
achieving one's own standards. One sets
these standards by first of all rejecting all the false notions one has
acquired about oneself over the years, then by accepting one's genuine
limitations, or rather the limits of the body. In the last analysis, one's limitations can only be assessed by
trying as hard as one can to surpass them, by not accepting them as real until
you have sincerely tested them.
The real point is this: when we are born we have 'unlimited'
potential, but very few of us actually realise it. Why not? What goes wrong,
and why? How do we limit
ourselves? Why do we make
mistakes? Is there anything that can be
done about it?
These are deep questions, and the answers to them seem to be bound
up with the ideas we had when we were newly born. How were these ideas arrived at?
What is the general mechanism by which we humans get our ideas? I think the development of ideas in humans
of any age, from 100 minutes old to 100 years old, is basically the same, and
it exactly parallels the way in which scientific ideas are formed, by what is
known as the 'scientific method'.
Science works because it utilises the same method that each of have
used, unconsciously, since we were born.
Just as there is no guarantee that science provides us with eternal
truths, so our old ideas, which did us good once, need no longer necessarily do
so. The way we form bad ideas is
exactly the same way in which we form good ones; unfortunately we refuse to let
go of the bad ideas despite the fact that they are no longer of any use to us.
Since the mechanism by which we form ideas operates from the
moment we are born, lets go right back to square one, to ourselves when we were
a few days old, the Newborn.
All human individuals, people, are conceived in their mother's
womb (leave aside test tube babies) when their father's sperm fertilizes one of
their mother's eggs. The fertilized
egg, destined to become a new person, implants itself in the wall of the womb
where it develops over a period of 9 months into a baby. At the allotted time the baby is born, it is
ejected somewhat forcefully from its cosy first home in its mothers belly into
the cruel world (cruel, that is, by comparison to the womb).
From this point on, the new person is on its own; no longer
protected physically by the warm soft flesh of its mother, nor connected
physically to her via the cord and placenta.
Of course, the mother will nearly always care for and protect the baby after
it is born, as well as she is able, up until the time the child can fend for
itself. Nevertheless, at the moment of
birth, a distinct new entity is created, totally separate from all other
entities. If he or she is to survive
and prosper, a long and difficult period of learning and growing must be
endured to prepare them for the rigours of life.
When does this learning begin?
What is the first experience the child has? At what point can they be said to be truly conscious?
Most people cannot recall any events in their early lives before the
age of about 3 or 4. Perhaps they have
vague recollections about sitting in a pram or a high chair, or they recall
their first Christmas or Birthday (not their chronological first, but the first
they remember). It is tempting to
suppose from this that the earliest memories we had are the earliest
glimmerings of consciousness, when we start laying down memories. But who can doubt that one and two year old
infants are conscious. They are capable
of many deliberate acts, they certainly know what's going on around them, at
least in principle. In fact apart from
perhaps the few days immediately following birth, babies show every sign of
being aware, of having desires and feelings.
I believe we are then conscious at birth and are laying down non-verbal
memories which are now difficult to access; in other words, these memories are
unconscious to us now.
If babies are conscious, perhaps in a rudimentary way (they don't
understand what's happening to them), just after being born, are they perhaps
conscious earlier still, when they are still in the womb? I think so.
There is evidence that babies are able to recognise the voice of their
mother from their exposure to it in the womb.
The sound of the mother's heartbeat, the constant companion to the
growing embryo for 9 months, induces a feeling of peace and security in newborn
infants, and in later life, a similar pulsing rhythm has the same effect. The 'foetal position' is adopted by young
children and sleeping adults and people under stress, again because it elicits
feelings of contentment, feelings which were presumably laid down before
birth. Psychologists refer to a desire
to 'return to the womb' - a need for protection, security, peace and warmth. This feeling may be based on a dim memory
that at one time each of us possessed this contentment, when we were in the
womb. It may even be that the great
difficulty many people have getting out of bed in the morning is an echo of the
resentment they feel at having to leave the womb in the first place!
So it seems that consciousness begins before we are born. As I have already defined it, consciousness
is awareness, the laying down of memories, and their future use to the
developing person. The experiences in
the womb and immediately after birth possess these characteristics, so they
qualify the newborn and the 'pre-born' as conscious. The 'human condition', then, seems to be that from an initial
awareness of peace, quiet, warmth, rhythm and contentment, one is rudely
confronted by a cold, noisy and confusing world; a world in which one has to
work (starting off with the simple expedient of crying) in order to achieve
again the contentment felt in the womb, the feeling of not being cold, hungry
and confused. It is as if the Newborn
was saying just after it was born, 'I was happy - and now this...What's
Happening?'. The infant, the child and
later the adult will spend a great deal of time and effort to try to answer
this question, the first question, the most fundamental of all questions.
As I have already said, this condition is
uniquely human because human infants are uniquely helpless and therefore need
to use their unique intelligence to come up with a very good answer indeed to
the question. They spend most of their
time trying to answer it, and they are never completely satisfied with their
answers. Nevertheless, it is the
mission of every newborn to find an answer which will suit them, and how
successful they are in life will depend in large part upon how good an answer
they can come up with, in other words how 'in touch with reality' they can
get. To find an answer they have to experiment
with reality, exactly as the scientist experiments. The newborn is the first, the seminal employer of the scientific
method.
There are long books written about the philosophy of science. I will cut through all that here, and merely
give my own working definition of the scientific method. There are three phases: observation,
hypothesis, and experiment. Observation
consists of data collection, taking note of as many pertinent events as
possible. Hypothesis consists of
developing a theory that explains the observations, and from which certain
generalisations can be made, thereby enabling certain predictions to be
made. Experiment consists of setting up
a controlled system or model in which the predictions of the theory can be
tested; a positive result leads to the theory being 'accepted', and a negative
result means it must be rejected and a new theory developed. Science, or rather 'scientific knowledge',
consists of a whole set of these hypotheses (theories, principles, laws),
starting from a small set of fundamental ones and building up, as a tree is
built up from a single trunk, into a vast array of detailed ideas, which get
more and more tenuous as one approaches the frontiers. We commonly call this set of ideas
'knowledge' and treat its precepts as 'true', but actually its all theory; it
is the 'best guess so far'. For
example, in the 20th century, a great deal of what passed for 'truth' in
previous centuries had to be scrapped to make way for the new and better
theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Fundamental beliefs were trashed, our very idea of reality, of 'what's
out there' has been radically challenged.
But today's scientific creed has no special claim to 'truth' either and,
for all we know, may not have a very long life itself. So much for 'eternal truth'.
I think that each of us was born an Infant Genius; born with this
scientific nature built-in. Babies
strive constantly to make sense of what's going on around and within them. Its hard work, which explains why they sleep
a lot. There's just so much data that
the poor little chap doesn't know what to do with it. So having first secured a safe place, he cuts off the input
(falls asleep), and then he sorts it out.
Some of this sorting out can be recalled on waking and is interpreted it
as dreaming. We carry on dreaming all
our lives, but in the first few years we do a great deal more of it. Much research has been done into this early,
and very early, learning, and I use this as one source of my information. But one can also draw on three direct
sources: our own memory and introspection about how the mind works; scientific
method; and language. Why
language? Because it is a
'codification' of our pure ideas about the world, 'the idea made flesh' as it
were. The sections that follow are a
synthesis of ideas derived from these four sources.
One of the main tasks of the baby is to discriminate, to distinguish
between things. This splits the world
up into myriad parts, which must then be brought back together in some way, and
this is achieved by collecting together things which have something in common. Having so sorted things into sets of
'similar' ideas, the child gives each set a label, and also records what it is
about the things in that set which distinguish them from the contents of other
sets and which they therefore have in common.
Needless to say, all these thought processes are going on without using
words. The label is probably some sort
of image: a picture, sound, feeling or symbol, or possibly even an abstract
image such as a circle (which might symbolise a face). These labels, or tags, are given to the
sets, to the individual things, and to the attributes they have in common. The two processes, sorting and tagging, go
on side by side.
But all the baby is doing so far is 'data collection' and
storage. This has its equivalent in
science, namely observation and recording.
Clearly there has to be more to it than this; and there is. The breakthrough (or breakthroughs, for
there is a long string of them) comes when the baby links a set of objects or
ideas to something in which it has an interest, such as food, warmth, security,
or comfort. These 'desires' form a set
themselves, roughly called 'what I want'.
What the baby does is to form a hypothesis that some other set is
(somehow) linked to the set 'what I want'.
Here is a somewhat fanciful illustration. Lets suppose there are three sets that the baby might well form
at this stage. We can give them names,
corresponding to the tags, images, that the baby gives them: 'what I want',
'what I can do', and 'what provides things'.
The baby might form his hypothesis in two stages: firstly, that there is
a link between these three sets, secondly that there is a sequence, something
like 'if I want something (say food) then I must do something (say cry) then it
will be provided.'
I must emphasise that this is just a thought experiment, an
illustration - I'm not saying that this is exactly what goes on in a baby's
mind (I don't see how we could ever know that). But they must be forming hypotheses, having ideas of some sort in
their strange and wordless world. I
have sketched out what kind of things they must be doing: discriminating
things, sorting them into sets, tagging, linking the sets, establishing
regularities. It is all done using
images to represent, to the baby's dawning mind, the world around it. Much later, the child will link these images
to the funny noises it knows its parents make, and will try to make the same
noises itself, and try to talk.
The point I'm trying to make is this: before children learn to
talk they already have a pretty sophisticated view of the world, and a sense of
their own place in it, and an idea of their own power to affect the world and
satisfy their desires. But this view is
entirely wordless, a collection of sets of images, of how they relate to each
other, and of regularities and conditionals (we might call them principles,
ways in which the child has generalised his experimental observations) which
can be used to predict outcomes (what will happen if I do X? probably Y) and to explain events (things
fall downwards, the sky is up, falling over hurts, and so on). When he learns to talk, the child acquires a
new set of tags, replacing his old images with words (though the echo of the
image probably remains, as if the word was charged with the image, to link in
with his fundamental principles).
It seems that storing sounds (and later visual patterns, written
words) is more efficient than using images and the child's mind takes a great
leap forward at this point and sets about finding things out with enormous
enthusiasm; asking lots of questions, doing lots of different things, trying
even harder to sort it all out. The
increased efficiency of storage brought about by using language might be
responsible for the difficulty we experience in recalling events that occurred
before we were about 3 years old. The
early storage mechanism is just not as good as the language based one. However, as I have already suggested, the
traces of our early experiences are still recorded in our brains somehow, and still affect our attitudes today.
A consequence of this early wordless understanding is that
language itself, since it is built on top of this primitive world view, must be
dependant upon it; language is grounded in the early phase, the phase of
images; our understanding of words is based upon our early understanding of the
world. As we grow older, our ideas
about words and their use and meaning become more and more sophisticated
(probably overly so), but first and foremost it is the 1 or 2 yearold that
'understands' language. This infant is still
very much alive today in our adult brains - it forms the basis of that part of
our psyche which we call the unconscious.
It is not conscious to us, I suspect, in the same sense that we are no
longer conscious of our life as the 1 or 2 yearold. In other words, it is not that this faculty lacks consciousness,
but that we are unable to recall its being conscious, and this is simply
because it is a wordless entity which deals rather with images and
feelings. Our super-efficient storage
mechanism is based upon words, and the corresponding retrieval mechanism
(remembering) is also word-based, so we find it difficult to remember our early
wordless phase, and we find it difficult to contact the wordless part of our
adult minds.
The struggles of the Infant Genius to understand his world tie in
with the remarks I made earlier about the aims of philosophy. The human Newborn starts 'philosophising'
from day one, asking the fundamental question 'What's happening?'. His mind is uncluttered, as yet, by ideas so
his thinking is actually clearer than it will ever be - in some ways he is the
greatest philosopher ever. The slow
process of sorting things out proceeds, without as yet the use of words: things
are tagged and put into sets; sets are related; in particular attributes,
properties, states, and how things change are all noted; regularities, causes
and effects are noted; hypotheses are formed.
The sum total of all this work is a model; it is the infant's Model of
'how things seem to be'. This Model,
which each of us formed before we could talk, is the basis upon which we
understand the world today. Our current
sophisticated Models developed from this early version, and we cling
tenaciously to many of the principles and tenets laid down in those first few
years. We aren't even aware that we do
this because the ideas are so fundamental to us that we take them for granted;
they are unconscious assumptions, but they are still very much alive.
Why do I insist that the 1 or 2 yearold (or even the pre-born) is
in some way still around today even after we have all grown up? It is as if the mind, or the brain which the
mind is the working of, were like a slowly setting jelly. At first it is totally fluid, and therefore
totally useless - it can't make sense of anything. As time goes by, and as certain features of the world 'make
sense', they are recorded; a small zone within the jelly sets into some pattern
or other. Once set the jelly never
melts again - it is a permanent record of the idea formed as it was at a
particular time, and it stays with remainder of the mind, the slowly setting
jelly, for evermore. So the early ideas
which we formed as infants are still there, deep down in the 'bottom layers' of
the jelly. In a sense the deeper layers
are the infant we once were - they still form part of our minds, and they still
perceive and think as the small child once did. They still give us those deep and fundamental feelings both of
well-being and of distress that the baby felt.
This happens even though in our adult bodies the rest of the jelly has
almost completely set (we are 'set' in our ways), and there are many layers on
top of the more primitive ones. We live
today on the surface of the jelly, a thin fluid which represents the day to day
problems we have to face.
Another analogy which presents itself is that of geological
strata. The deeper one digs through the
layers of rock laid down beneath rivers and seas, the further back in time one
is moving towards the prehistory of the Earth.
The remnants of our prehistoric past are still with us in the form of
fossils, just as the remnants of our personal past, our individual
'pre-memory', are still with us if we dig deep enough through our mental strata. The difference is that our 'pre-memories'
are alive, they are living fossils, rather than the long-dead stone fossils
formed millions of years ago.
The idea that all our previous experience is recorded in our
brains, that we can and do play back significant experiences over and over,
that the person or persons we once were are somehow still around in our heads
influencing our thoughts and desires and behaviour, is fundamental to modern
psychology and psychotherapy. It is
captured with particular lucidity by the model of personality used in a branch
of therapy called Transactional Analysis, or TA. The technique involves analysing the behaviour of people taking
part in group therapy sessions, in particular the verbal transactions the group
members have. The personality the group
members is considered to be composed of a number of parts, and what each member
says depends upon which part of their personality is speaking.
There are three parts, or ego states, labelled Parent, Adult and
Child, or P, A, C. The Parent is both
the conscience of the person, and the part that 'looks after' them (the
Critical and Nurturing Parent respectively).
The Child is the one that has all the fun, and that is creative. The Adult is the logical, realistic,
calculating part. The origins of the
Parent and of the Child are the memories and lessons that the person recorded
as an infant. It is as if he has
retained a version of both his parents, and also of himself when he was very
small and these memories play a large part in determining the behaviour,
including verbal behaviour, of the grown up person. The Adult consists not of memories about the infant and its
parents, but just about 'the world', physical things, 'objective' reality
(though not as objective as all that since the infant has had to interpret a
lot of what it experienced).
These ego states are analogous to my layers-in-a-jelly, with the
Child and Parent being the lower, fundamental, primitive layers, and the Adult
being the many layers on top. The Child
and Parent are grounded in an unconscious, wordless world (of the early
infant). The Adult, which can be
identified with Reason, is conscious and word based. It might be supposed hat the Adult is in some way 'in charge',
especially as it has the best appreciation of 'reality', the world; but this
would be a mistake. All three ego
states are required for someone to behave 'normally', and to the extent that
one of the trio is too large (or too small) or is 'cut off' from the others, a
person can be said to be 'abnormal'.
This is not the place to expand upon the PAC model, fascinating
though it is. The point I want to
stress is that our personalities are a product of everything that has ever
happened to us, and that what happened to us when we were very young, shortly
after we were born, is the fundamentally important part. In the PAC model these events are recorded
in the Child and the Parent, which jointly 'control' the individual via the
mediation of the Adult (Reason).
Our world view, then, in which our use of language is grounded, is
founded upon a wordless set of ideas and beliefs, our early Model, created by
an infant less than 3 years old. This
has, it seems to me, profound implications for philosophy, particularly for the
philosophy of language. Early in the
20th century, psychologists were just coming around to the idea that many of
the psychological and behavioural problems of human adults were caused by
'traumas' or repeated 'conditioning' in the patients early lives. The seeds of mental illness are sown before
one is 5 years old (apart of course from mental problems which have an obvious
physical cause, such as brain damage, which can happen any time). I think the time is ripe for philosophers to
take a leaf out of the psychologist's book and to go back to our early
experiences to sort out the profound problems of existence, reality and
meaning.
The questions philosophers discuss are not new questions; we each
of us asked ourselves these same questions when we were only just born. Depending upon what answers we dreamed up
then, and upon how well or badly these answers fared as we grew up and faced
the world, the same questions may come back to haunt us in our adult lives. In fact they haunt us all, but some choose
to ignore them and 'get on with living', or to plunge themselves into
activities which take up so much time and energy (and there are plenty of
these!) that there is none left over to spend on the deeper problems. Some just put the questions away in a deep
vault in their heads, throw away the key, and hope that they never see the
light of day again. But there are some
who are not scared to face up to the difficult and intractable problems, namely
the philosophers, both professional and amateur. It is as if they say to themselves 'Well, after over twenty years
of waiting for someone to give me the answer to these questions, I now discover
that nobody knows! I suppose I shall just have to figure it out myself'.
What they fail to do, though, is to go
back to the time when they first posed the question, when they asked 'What's
happening?'. It is here that they made
their mistakes, where they made assumptions which later turned out to be quite
without foundation, and which cause them today to have to search out new
answers or new assumptions which have stronger support. To find out what assumptions and mistakes we
made, we have to go back to when we were newborn and try to discover what ideas
we had then, which are almost unshakeable today, and which are the source of
much of the confusion we now call philosophy.
What sort of things does the pre-language infant think about? What answers does he arrive at? What is his world view and how does it
influence the rest of his life?
I may have given the impression that the Newborn is a blank sheet,
without any idea at all what to do.
This isn't entirely correct, since he has a few instincts which keep him
alive (with a great deal of help from his mother) until he matures. These instincts are the 'reflexes': crying,
sucking, sleeping. There is also a
powerful curiosity, a desire to explore and learn about the world. This drive is the desire to answer the
fundamental question, 'What's happening?'.
It is the means by which the child acquires knowledge and skill and
eventually becomes able to cope with life.
It is the drive to sort things out, to tidy up, to form hypotheses, to
create a Model and to test the Model out 'for real'.
Curiosity (wonder, fascination, lust for knowledge) is the trick
we humans possess which has (almost) freed us from the bonds of our animal
past, from our instincts. By having
such large brains (to store the required facts, ideas and hypotheses) we can
learn strategies for survival for ourselves rather than having to have them
'programmed' into us by our genes. In
our primate past, this made us enormously adaptable because we can react very
quickly to a sudden change in our circumstances, such as might be brought about
by natural disasters (floods, fires, plagues, droughts), by migration (moving
to a colder climate), by encountering new species (discovering the bears of
North America?), by changing food supplies (switching from hunting to
gathering), or by almost any conceivable predicament. It would take evolution thousands or millions of years to adapt
to such changes, but humans adapt almost instantaneously because they can throw
away their old behaviour patterns and develop new ones, if not within a single
generation, then usually by the second generation.
The price we pay for this unique adaptability is a large head
(leading to painful, difficult and dangerous childbirth), and a prolonged
period of immaturity of around 15 years.
During this time we have to learn how to cope, and the majority of these
coping skills, the most fundamental ones, are acquired very young, in the first
5 years. It is at this time that our
avid curiosity is so important, and it is this feeling of panic, of desperately
wanting to know what's going on, of overwhelming desire to explain and control
the world that stays with us throughout our lives. It is born out of our need for security, to ensure our continued
comfort and well being. It is the basis
of many of the commercial and academic pursuits we see today, in particular of
science and philosophy.
For a few days after it is born, the infant doesn't make a lot of
progress - it is too busy getting over the shock of being 'awakened' in the
first place. Every time he wakes up
from sleep, the child probably re-lives this shock and promptly starts crying:
'Oh no, its still here.' Pretty soon though, it starts to get used to it, and
even begins to notice times when the world isn't so bad after all. There is sleep, when the baby's
consciousness takes a rest, feeding, being rocked and cuddled, being played
with, and even just lying there peacefully attending to events. Initially he can attend to sound only, but
when he wants something other than the ceiling to look at, the child asks to be
sat up, or propped up so that he can watch what's going on around him. He soon starts to use his hands, and later
to move around.
Earlier I said that one of the newborn's first tasks is to learn
to discriminate things. The implication
is that initially the baby cannot distinguish between things at all, everything
is merged, he has no concept of separate objects, all is one. He cannot even distinguish himself from the
background noise. All he has is an
impression of things going on - his first hypothesis is 'Something's happening'
which leads to his first question 'What?' The idea that something is happening
is caused by a direct perception of the phenomenon of Change, in other words of
Time. Whilst he was in his mother's womb,
he didn't have any notion of change because his environment was so constant and
unchanging. If anything did 'happen'
which left an impression (the sound of his mother's voice), it merged with the
general background of constant warmth, nutrients, heartbeat and gentle
motion. All of a sudden there is a
mighty change - Reality dawns. The
cacophony assaulting his senses (which is rather called a 'confusion' by the
newborn at the time since it is not value laden) is the least of his problems -
for the first time ever, he is hungry; he must now feed. For a little while, he preoccupies himself
with feeding and getting away from the confusion, until he realises its not
going to go away, so he'd better get used to it.
An important point is that the baby cannot discern itself, he
cannot isolate an entity to which things happen, he cannot form hypotheses
containing the idea of 'I'. There is no
self. It is not that he thinks 'I am
hungry', but rather 'there is hunger' (again, these are thoughts using images,
not words). His other hypotheses show a
similar lack if self: 'let there be crying; there is cold; feeding is
occurring', and so on. Not only can he
not distinguish self, he cannot distinguish his mother either. She and he are both part of a single entity
which is all that there is, the All, the One.
But after around about six months, when the baby has started to be able
to do things, to control bits of the world with its hands, he starts to realise
that there is a fundamental division in his reality, a division into 'me' and
'the rest'.
The newborn is not in control at all, but this doesn't worry him -
he knows nothing different. But then he
learns that there are some things (his hands, eyes, head) that he can control,
which respond instantly to his will.
His curiosity, the desire to learn, will be well served if he can
directly manipulate the world rather than be manipulated; if he can be active
rather than passive, an effective agent rather than a ball 'tossed on the winds
of fate'. In the long run, he wants to
be able to control everything, to guarantee his own security, to ensure his own
survival. He naturally wants to be able
to control everything as easily as he does his hands; but he can't. His mother is the only thing outside of his
own body that responds to his will, and she sometimes takes her time about
it. She is clearly a different category
of thing to his arms and legs. How does
he make sense of all this? Some bits
of the world respond instantly to his will, some with a delay, some not at
all. He puts the bits into sets at
first, waiting for the time when some hypothesis dawns which explains it. What he wants to do is to define the extent
of the sets, the boundaries. After a
while it clicks that the boundary of the set containing arms and legs is simply
his skin. This bag of skin is also the
boundary of his sensation, what he can directly feel, as opposed to external
objects which he can't feel. This bag
of skin is clearly very special to him; in fact...and with a bound, he is. His self is created. 'I am.'
You might well think that this breakthrough is a good thing and
that the infant human is pretty pleased with himself for having worked it
out. Far from it. He is devastated. In having to distinguish himself from 'the rest', he has had to abandon
his claim to the rest; from being all things and all powerful he has come down
to Earth with a bump; he is just a bag of skin! Worst of all, he has had to
admit that he is separate from his mother.
This is quite terrifying. For as
long as he can remember (only a few months, but the whole of his life) he and
his mother have been One, which was just great, because she was the Provider,
the source of all the good things: milk, warmth, comfort, play, love. Now he has to admit that Mum is not a part
of him, that he and she are separate.
Suddenly he is alone, abandoned, and very frightened. Apart from birth itself (perhaps), this must
be the greatest shock of our lives. The
pain of the separation and loneliness stays with us, fuelling the lesser fears
we have in later life.
The fear generated by this separation, by the creation of self,
also fuels another almost instinctive drive, one through which he can channel
his other drives, namely the urge to be self-ish. Previously, his 'instinct' was for survival; but for the survival
of everything (which is what he though he was), not just the bag of skin. Now he realises that what's important is
what's in the skin, himself, and this immediately assumes an overwhelming
importance. He embarks on a crusade to
do everything possible to satisfy the self: to control his body; to control the
environment, chiefly (at that time) his mother, since she is still the only
known source of food and protection.
This is the start of a paradoxical relationship, which seems to be the
model for all human relationships. The
baby loves the mother, the source of all good things, someone who until
recently seemed to be part of the baby himself, and without whom he would surely
die. At the same time, he depends totally
upon her, a separate entity over whom he has no direct control at all - he is
literally at her mercy. His attempts to
control her, now redoubled since he realised she was separate from him, become
more desperate, he feels more helpless and fearful than ever. The fear of abandonment and the dependence
of the child on the mother breeds a bitter resentment in him, and he gets
particularly angry and upset when mother doesn't do what he wants. These feelings typically characterise an
attitude known as hate. The
relationship of child to mother is one of love-hate. It is as if they were two sides of the same coin, with 'heads'
being love, apparently; were it otherwise, if hate dominated, the relationship
would terminate prematurely - millions of successful human families are
testimony that this happens extremely rarely.
At the mention of the family, it is well
to digress a little from the one sided viewpoint of the baby and look at the
family unit as a whole, in particular at Mum and Dad, the humans responsible
for creating this new person in the first place. What are they doing, and why?
It is not only the child that experiences the love-hate nature of
the relationship. All relationships are
two way, and the mother can certainly feel the 'hate' coming form the child
(though she may shy away using that term); the child is badly behaved, selfish,
throws tantrums. She can also feel her
own 'hate'; the feeling of being enslaved to the child, of being trapped by her
own love of him, of doing everything she can for him and getting no reward at
all for it, and little thanks. Clearly
there are rewards, there is a loving aspect to the relationship, a positive
side - but it is often difficult to summon up these positive feelings when the
little brat is having a screaming fit.
Some time after the dawning of the self, the child recognises that
there are two figures other than itself which seem to share the role of
Provider. Mother is still the main one,
but the other one, Father, starts to assume a slightly different role,
particularly as the newly selfish child starts to be difficult. (Interestingly, this is also the time that
the child starts to acquire language.
The father's role involves the use of language and instruction far more
than does the mother's non-verbal or physical role of feeding and caring.) The baby will know something of the
character of the Father since it will have experienced the masculine side of
mother (and it will also experience the feminine side of father). But in its attempt to simplify things, the
child prefers to identify maternal behaviour with mother and paternal behaviour
with father. It is helped in this if
mother and father spend the majority of their time in the role of their own
sex, but they will both need to switch roles now and then. To see why this is, lets look more closely
at the these two phenomena: biological sex (male/female) and parental role
(masculine/feminine).
First we have to define the terms. Once more, I will use my own working definition. Sex is a fact of life. How and why it arose is a fascinating
question, but one which I cannot afford to spend time on here. For now we must accept that human beings
reproduce sexually. What this means is
that humans (and a great many other organisms) are divided into two types, call
them A and B. To have offspring, an A
and a B must mate. The offspring are
'born', and in, humans, A and B co-operate to rear the child until it reaches
maturity and leaves home later to reproduce itself. Being mammals, one of the two types, A or B, has to bear the
developing baby inside its body for 9 months, and then go through a painful
childbirth. It makes no difference
really which of the two types it is.
Lets pick type A. Once having
made this assignment, we know that type A humans are what we call females, and
type B humans are males. Poor old type
A, the female, has had to invest a huge amount of time and effort carrying the
child, and then giving birth to it; all the male has had to do is mate. From a biological viewpoint, this
'unfairness' is balanced out by the female demanding a 'fee' of the male for
his use of her body to reproduce, to pass on his genes to the next
generation. The fee is that the male
sticks around and helps the female to raise the child. On the whole, both parties agree to this
arrangement, and a stable family unit is formed (though there is a certain
'failure rate').
So far so good. But once
the baby is born, the female role as child-bearer ends (this is of course not a
role the male can adopt). Now the
maternal role takes over. In the main
this involves feeding the baby, and once again it is the female that is best
equipped to take on this duty since she lactates, and males do not. The female is the natural nurturer, the
natural nurse. And she also has the
stronger maternal instinct of the two parents; she spent the time, effort and
pain bringing the new person into the world; her investment (biologically) in
the child is far greater than that of the male; and she formed a powerful bond
with the baby immediately after its birth.
The situation is not as black and white as child-bearing was, though,
and with a little effort, the male is perfectly capable of bottle feeding the
baby, and caring for it completely.
Males have maternal instincts too, and they have a feminine, caring side
which they can use if they want to. But
this 'role reversal' seldom happens.
The point is that, in general, its just too risky for the mother
to leave her precious charge in the hands of the father. Its a question of mathematics. Other things being equal, and neglecting the
possibility of twins, a female could only have 20 to 30 children in her entire
life at maximum; a male could sire literally hundreds of children (if he were allowed
to get away with it). There simply
isn't as much at stake for the male in the risky business of child
rearing. In the few million years that
it took for humans to evolve from apes, before the dawning of civilisation some
few thousand years ago, the strategy which turned out to be most successful was
for the female to adopt the maternal role, the feminine, caring role. But the male has retained his feminine
nature, which urges him to care for and protect the child and mother (though
not with the utter selflessness of the mother for the child).
What about the masculine nature, the paternal role? This role (taken mainly by the male, but,
again, potentially and occasionally to be adopted by the female) is to
administer discipline, to teach the child control. It is not necessarily consciously adopted; it springs naturally
from the male's desire to have his own way, to be selfish. Being physically more powerful than the
child, the father usually gets his own way, and the child just has to learn to
cope with it, and it does this by learning self-control. Selfishness is also the source of the
mother's lapses into the masculine role; it is her 'self' fighting back against
the enslavement by the child, and if she didn't fight back, she would become
truly enslaved, leading to the child being in control and not her. The mother gained this masculinity, this
selfishness, when she herself was a child.
The birth of the self which I described in the last section is also the
birth of selfishness, of masculinity in the child (male or female); it is the
self asserting its own rights.
Where does the maternal, feminine role have its origin? Its origin is in the bond formed between
mother and newborn immediately after the birth. The caring instinct is necessarily completely selfless, in
absolute contrast to the selfishness of the child. Only the mother feels the full power of this drive. The child (male or female) can only marvel
at it and try to imitate it and learn the power of the selfless act, to develop
a caring nature. The female child may
one day feel the maternal instinct directly, but the male will never do
so. Consequently, females are generally
prepared for this day, and males are not.
This has the effect of polarising the masculine/feminine difference; but
initially, and in fact until the female actually gives birth (which could be
after she is 30) there is no inherent difference between the sexes as regards
the two roles. Both males and females
need to be selfish and selfless at the same time, at least in the social world
we humans live in. Selflessness is a
sort of 'fee' we pay others to satisfy our selfishness. Goodwill is the currency of social interaction. Without it, if one were absolutely selfish,
one would not be able to live in society; people who consistently fail to pay
their social debts tend to end up in hospital, in prison, or in the grave.
The battle between the mother and her child is the origin of the
battle of the sexes - possibly of all human conflict. The female, the mother, takes on the maternal, selfless role:
this is the feminine nature. The child
(male or female) takes on the selfish role, the masculine nature, the desire to
get ones own way, to be in control.
Female children tend to be 'weaned off' the masculinity (to a degree)
since they identify with their mothers and are prepared to become mothers
themselves. Males tend to retain their
masculinity, in fact it is usually encouraged, to the detriment of the caring
nature they might otherwise pick up from their mothers. They identify with the father, the
law-giver, the strong, authority, the dispenser of discipline, the one who
always gets his way. To the extent that
the two natures are given equal weight within the family as a whole, that there
is not a predominance of one over the other, that a balance is maintained
between the selfless and the selfish, a family is 'healthy'. It is the balance of the individual against
the 'machine', the family unit, the model for society at large; family conflict
(and harmony) is the source of social and political conflict (and harmony) in
the wider world.
Once again, this is a fascinating avenue that I don't intend to go
any further down, concentrating as I wish to do on the development of the
child.
We have had a look at the the roles of the parents, at what they
are trying to do and why. Lets return
to the child. He is cared for by his
mother, whom he tries to control, and she complies to a degree, but draws the
line somewhere. He is given discipline,
and taught self control by his father, whom he has little success in
controlling; the child has to give in.
The self control learned by the child helps to ameliorate the demands he
makes of the mother. The father, then,
is in charge, he is the head of the household, he cannot be controlled by the
child, and he appears to wield the ultimate sanction; the threat of withdrawing
his and the mother's love, though if it came to it the mother would probably
resist the use of this measure. But
even the threat of it is terrifying to the child, who would clearly die without
the parents' care. In fact the child,
once it has learned the rules - that bribery works where tantrums don't,
usually goes out of its way to please the parents.
The father is, in a sense, instilling a moral code into the
child. But only in a sense. The father is unlikely to be consciously
indulging in ethical training, unless he is, perhaps, a man of the cloth. He doesn't ever read out a list of
rules. He just lets the child go so far,
then he draws the line. He may get
angry, he may punish the child (not necessarily physically, since this produces
complications). As part of the
conditioning process he will precede his disciplinary sessions with verbal
warnings in order that he child learns that when father says 'No' he means
it. After a time, the child just does
as its told, with the odd lapse, perhaps, of 'trying it on'; this, at least, is
the ideal pattern. Adolescence signals
a new phase, when the rebellious youth re-appears, preparing for the day when
the teenager has to leave home.
The question arises, if the father doesn't
lay down a set of explicit rules, except the odd incentive like 'you won't get
any pudding if you don't eat your greens', how does the child discover what to
do and what not to do? In fact we've
already answered this question, but I will elaborate this answer in the next
section.
The role of the father can be interpreted as 'moral conditioning',
teaching the child what he should and shouldn't do. This lesson is a fundamental one for human society, but though it
is a common experience for all of us, its effect is largely unconscious. This might seem an odd thing to say, after
all we each of us know what is right and what is wrong; or do we? In fact there is an entire field of
philosophy devoted to answering the question 'What is right?' (which should to
you suggest that the question is very difficult to answer); this field is known
as Ethics, one of the oldest of the philosophical disciplines. It attempts to say what Ethics is, what
Right means, and (optionally) to put into words 'the rules' concerning Right
behaviour. Not everyone agrees with a
single set of answers to these questions; arguments have raged for over 2000
years. It also seems that as time goes
on and societies change, their ideas of right and wrong change. Different nations, cultures, religions and
ethnic groups each have their own ideas about how people should behave. It is far from clear that there is a single
answer to the question, let alone what that answer is. I think a major part of the difficulty is
that our individual perception of what is Right is unconscious, and that our
attempts to codify this 'sense' of right and wrong, to turn it into a set of
rules, a form of words, always fall short.
Our perception is unconscious because our training was done
unconsciously; our fathers did not supply us with a set of rules, we had to
work it out ourselves - and the 'working out' of infants is done wordlessly and
unconsciously. The faculty we develop
to perceive 'what is right' is actually the same faculty we develop to perceive
'what is true': the Intuition.
Although the working of the Intuition resides in the unconscious,
the inaccessible part of our minds, this does not define it; the unconscious
contains a great many things besides this.
Intuition is only one of the faculties that are developed by the Newborn
to help it to cope, but it is certainly the most important. The function of Intuition is to assess new
hypotheses, to reject the bad ones, and to accept the good ones. It did not exist at birth, but has grown and
become more powerful as the child's understanding of the world has grown. The judgement of the Intuition is accepted
completely by the child; it has no other way of deciding which ideas to accept
and which to reject.
What is this Intuition?
How can it know what is true (or what is right) and what isn't? How does it work it out? Well, first we have to say what 'true' means
- and this is another deep philosophical question which I must side-step. I shall use for my definition the same
'definition' I used earlier to explain scientific 'truth'. This is that to designate something as
'true' is say it is 'the best guess so far'.
A theory or hypothesis is 'true' insofar as it has not been shown to be
demonstrably false, and it has value in terms of its explanatory power; in
other words its predictive power, how useful it is, how well it works. For practical purposes, we can substitute
for the question 'is it true?' with the easier one 'does it work?'; if it
works, its true. This is a sort of
pragmatic approach, but the Newborn isn't interested in abstractions and
absolutes, it wants to get a grip on itself, and on the world as quickly as possible. When its reached a more stable state, then
there will be plenty of time to go back over the early 'quick fixes' and
replace them with more considered views.
But this seldom happens, either because the 'quick fixes' are too deeply
embedded and hidden, or because to replace them would upset the stable state;
it would be back to square one, and the child (or adult) will cling to its new
found security, however weak its foundations happen to be.
So Intuition develops not to ask 'is it true?', but 'does it
work?'. Its job is prediction: 'if I
include this new idea in my scheme of things, will it work?'. It tries to fit the new idea in with all the
other ideas the child has acquired (ones which it previously passed). If the idea fits, it works; its true! Of
course, it is sometimes not as easy as this.
The new idea might be made to fit if certain old ideas were dispensed
with, or were modified to let the new idea in.
What could possibly justify this, and why should the Intuition be trying
so hard to incorporate the new hypothesis?
Simply because its prime directive, if you like, is to develop a set of
hypotheses which works best. If by
including the new hypothesis, which may involve getting rid of some old ones,
the new set of ideas 'works better' than the old set, then Intuition plumps for
the new set and for the new hypothesis.
In today's jargon, this 'set of ideas' or hypotheses is known as a
model. I have already referred to it as
the Model of the world which the Newborn constructs to 'make sense' of what is
happening to him. We each of us carry
around a Model of 'how things are' as we see them. If we make the assumption, as most people do, that there is a single,
external, absolute Reality, then what we are trying to do is create a Model of
Reality. The better our internal Model
corresponds with Reality, the more 'in touch with Reality' we are, the more
effective and successful will our lives be.
'Growing up' for the human child can be seen as its continuing attempts
to improve upon its Model, to increase the degree of correspondence between the
Model and Reality. The role of
Intuition is to set up a tentative model, which includes any new hypotheses to
be tested and any changes to old hypotheses required to incorporate it, and
'run' it. It can gauge how much better
or worse the tentative model is than the current Model; if its better, then it
will become the new Model.
This process is akin to modifying the engine of a car, then
turning the engine over (with the car stationary) and listening to the sound of
the engine to ensure that it still runs sweetly, preferable sweeter than
before. If its okay, then take her out
for a spin; this is the acid test. Is
she faster, more powerful, responsive, sensitive, or positive? If so then our 'ear', which assessed the
sweetness of the sound of the engine, is good.
The Intuition is like this 'ear' for the sound of smooth running; but
not of a car engine, but of the Model (or a tentative version of it). The 'ear' has to be trained, though, so the
Model has to be 'taken for a spin' just as the car is. In other words, in adopting the new Model,
we adopt a new way of life. If our
Intuition is good, the new way of life is 'better' than the old one, in some
way; one is more effective, successful, happier, getting more out of life. If life isn't better (and with many of our
very early attempts at modelling, this will often be so), then the new
hypothesis will have to be scrapped and the old one resurrected. But perhaps we will have learned something,
and our Intuition will be more accurate next time.
Intuition is itself a part of the Model. Some of the hypotheses being tested concern Intuition
itself. Hopefully, the Intuition
rapidly improves in order to prevent us accepting all sorts of dangerous and
false notions, in fact its main job is to do this. But it has to train itself, so to speak, to pull itself up by its
own bootstraps. Eventually it develops
a good ear for a sweetly running Model.
How does it do this? What are
the signs of a good Model? What are the
clues that tip off the Intuition that its hit on a winner, or a loser? I've no idea. The clues that we use to determine whether or not an idea 'rings
true' are unconscious. They are similar
to the non-verbal clues, the body-language, that people use all the time, and
which unconsciously affect our behaviour toward them. When these postures, gestures, tones of voice, and so on are
pointed out to us (by someone who has done the research), we become conscious
of them for a while, but they soon lapse back into the unconscious. So it is for 'truth clues'.
However, there is one aspect of truth which we are conscious of,
one way in which the working of Intuition is manifest to us; our aesthetic
sense. The appreciation of beauty comes
from the same source as the appreciation of truth: Intuition. The
word doesn't quite fit in this context, but the faculty has many names
and I prefer to stick to this one, with the note that it is also the
Aesthetic. If we try to analyse what it
is about a beautiful object that gives it beauty, what the essence of Beauty
is, we find it very difficult. We can
label the many aspects that Beauty appears to have: proportion, balance,
elegance, economy, simplicity, clarity, and so on. Presumably, our aesthetic sense is capable of registering all
these aspects (and many more) instantly and unconsciously and from them
synthesising a single attribute which we call beauty. This is exactly how the Intuition discerns Truth. Each of the aspects of Beauty is a also clue
to the truth (elegance, economy, simplicity, clarity) of a proposition or
theory. We are unconscious of the
myriad of tiny details, perhaps, but the overall effect of recognising Truth
(and Beauty) is known to us. It is a
feeling of elation, of delight, of pleasure, or perhaps of awe, accompanied by
a smile or a nod or an open mouth, and an exclamation such as 'Yes, of course',
'That's it', or 'Why didn't I think of that?'.
By sharpening our aesthetic sense, we sharpen our intuitive sense. As has been said before, Beauty is Truth and
Truth is Beauty.
To recap, the child's Intuition has grown and refined itself,
along with the rest of its Model, by getting feedback from reality, by 'living'
the Model. If 'bad' ideas are
incorporated, life gets more difficult and confusing rather than less, and the
child 're-decides' and abandons the idea; 'good' ideas are the ones that
work. The Intuition is all the time
recording those features of the 'good ideas' which are common to them, and
those which are common to the 'bad ideas' so that in the future it will be able
to spot the danger signs, and also to recognise the clues to the truth. These clues and signs are largely
unconscious, but we do have access to them through our aesthetic sense, our appreciation
of Beauty. The child is progressing,
its Model gets closer to Reality, its Intuition improves - it is growing
up. A crucial lesson it has to learn is
what is Right, and it does this by employing the same faculty it is developing
to discern Truth and Beauty, namely Intuition.
This acts like an inner ear, listening to the the running of the new
Model to see if it runs sweetly. This
time, it is not that the child has incorporated a prospective hypothesis but
that he has performed a prospective deed.
Inasmuch as the deed affects the world at all, it will affect the
Model. Intuition must decide if the new
model runs sweeter or not, whether it is 'the right thing to do', or the
converse.
Just as we find it difficult to say what Beauty is or what Truth
is, so we have a problem working out what Right is; the problem of Ethics. The way we as individuals work it out again
seems to be unconscious. We 'imagine'
what would happen if we did or did not do X; if the result is positive, X is
right, otherwise not. This 'imagining'
is unconscious, so it is not the same as 'rehearsing', constantly going over a
scene in the mind, trying to second guess how we might behave in this or that
situation. This takes time (in fact too
much of our time is spent rehearsing), but the unconscious faculty is virtually
instantaneous, as the appreciation of Truth and Beauty is. I suspect that most of the time we know
straight away whether such and such a deed is right or wrong. What takes time is coming to terms with it,
or trying to explain to ourselves (in words) why it so.
Sometimes, Intuition fails.
It throws the question back at us.
What it is saying, in effect, is that it can't decide; that there are two possible models, one accepting
the new idea one rejecting it, and they both 'sound' the same. This puts the individual in a very difficult
position. It seems he has to make a
'conscious' decision, using Reason alone.
In fact Reason cannot make decisions at all - it is not Reason's job, it
wouldn't know how to. It cannot weigh
the pros and cons, because value (weight) is not something you can measure
objectively, and Reason is objective. The best it can do is toss a coin, which is equivalent to
'guessing'. With a bit of luck, if the
decision was wrong, it will become clear very quickly and 'damage limitation'
can take over.
How can it be that Intuition fails? This is a rare event, but when it happens it is usually very
significant, and deserves to be handled carefully, not dismissed with the toss
of a coin. To abandon oneself to fate
is an act of despair; it is to cede control of one's life to another agent, in
this case to a blind, unalive, unfair, capricious, merciless force. This is the very antithesis of what the
infant's struggle was about, a denial of what it is to be human, a denial of
life. Fate is chance, randomness,
chaos. It rules the universe. But in this little corner of the universe,
order has emerged, life has evolved.
Life is the constant struggle against chaos, against the ravages of
Time; the struggle to survive, to perpetuate, to be immortal, through oneself
or through one's offspring. What is it
that can drive us to consider rejecting our precious humanity?
Such dilemmas arise, I believe, from errors (mistakes, bad ideas)
which were incorporated into our Models long ago. I have already suggested how such mistakes arise: from our genes,
our upbringing, our parents, disease, disaster or a chance encounter. How deeply it affects us depends upon how
deeply it is rooted, which in turn depends upon how long ago the error was
made. The solution to the dilemma is to
root out the error, and re-decide (perhaps long after the initial decision) so
that only one of the possible models now rings true. This 'rooting out' can be done in many ways: psychoanalysis, soul
searching, meditation, prayer. But it
is never easy. If what we must
re-decide is fundamental to our Model, to our system of beliefs, then what we
are proposing to do will completely transform it. To many people it feels like a transformation of their world,
their personality, their identity, as if they are becoming someone else. It is this that brings about the despair.
Despair itself is not a bad thing, as long as one doesn't give in
to it, because it is an opportunity to learn, and to grow, to weed out the
mistakes, to achieve a better Model and become more successful and so on. It is convenient if we can get all our
despair behind us as early as possible (children are very tough, much more so
than adults) but there do seem to be some 'intractable' problems which linger
on into adulthood and cause trouble then, unless we have found some way to deal
with them. These problems are really
the fundamental ones, all stemming from the question 'What's happening?' as
asked by the Newborn. If we are lucky
we will have kept an open mind on precise answers to these questions,
especially since some of the things we learn as we grow up is how little other
people know, how much there is to know, and that the answers to the basic questions
seem to get further away and not nearer.
For most of us a satisfactory answer to the philosophical
questions will only be achieved once the more pressing problems of day to day
life have been tackled. This move away
from the fundamentals to the day to day seems to be tied up with the
development of language and Reason, the point at which the infant invests more
and more time and energy in developing a new faculty which (he hopes) will be
his salvation - the faculty which eventually becomes the Adult. However, because the Adult is grounded in
Language and Reason, which, as we have seen, is not able to recognise Truth, it
is not capable of answering the fundamental questions. The struggle of the Adult is manifest as
philosophy, religion, and mysticism. It
is the struggle to integrate the two faculties: Intuition and Reason.
I have concentrated in Part 2 on the pre-language phase, the
source of our unconscious feelings and faculties, in particular our Intuition,
our appreciation of Truth, Beauty, Right and Good. This phase is also the source of philosophical and mystical
ideas.
The idea of the Oneness of Creation is the echo of the oneness of
everything as perceived by the Newborn before the birth of the self. The idea of Nirvana is the unchanging
contentedness felt in the womb. The
idea of God is the echo of the huge and powerful figures of the parents:
father, law-giver, to be feared and respected; mother, carer and protector, to
be adored. The idea of Meaning (of
Life, of anything) is the quest to answer the fundamental question 'What's
Happening?' Mystery, the Unknown concerns what is 'out there' in the world,
which Science is gradually uncovering; but equally it is about what is 'in
here'. This is a mystery because it is
unconscious, because we cannot remember what happened to us as babies. What decisions did we make, and why? How do
these decisions affect us now? What I am trying to do here is to sketch out a
general answer to these questions. The
place to look for specific answers is within ourselves.
I am sketching out a framework upon which to hang the
answers. Each of us will have a
different set of specific answers because each of us is a different person,
with a different genetic make-up and a different upbringing. What answers we each gave to our early
wordless questions, whether stopgap or definitive, will be different for each
of us. But not all that different. 99% of any human's genes are shared with all
other humans (its what makes us humans and not apes, or plants) so the
difference is only 1%. Most of us share
a similar upbringing, especially in the West.
The fine detail is different, but in many ways we are all alike, and the
'core' answers must therefore be similar if not the same. The sameness arises not only from our
biological relatedness, but also from the fact that we live in the same world;
only a certain set of answers actually works.
Our Model, the touchstone of Intuition, is our personal 'best guess' at
how things are, how they work, what Reality is. Insofar as we all inhabit the same Reality, and we are all Homo
Sapiens we will each of us arrive at the same Model (within limits).
A good analogy is the automobile.
There is only one basic car. It
has 4 wheels, an engine and fuel tank, steering, brakes, controls, seats,
mirrors, windows, doors, bonnet and boot, and so on. But still, there are hundreds of different makes and models to
choose from, some with fancy gadgets and plush decor, some with lots of power,
some very large, some small. The
manufacturers are always ringing the changes, altering the 'surface' features,
in an effort to please the customer and satisfy a different corner of the
market. Nevertheless, a car is still a
car. And a human being is still a human
being before being male, female, black, white, young, old, tall, short, rich,
poor, sick, healthy, Tory, Communist, working class, insane, intelligent, or
any of a thousand things which serve to identify us and put us in our place.
In the mystical tradition, most often associated with the East,
the fact that all humans are fundamentally alike is expressed in a particularly
elegant and forceful way. This is that
all humans are really one human, that the 'true nature' of each and every
person is identical, that we are not each of us a separate 'self', but a
single, universal 'Self'. This is
clearly more than saying we are all alike, it is going one step further, and
quite a big step at that. It is
difficult for Western minds to accept because it is not rational, it seems
meaningless to our 20th century way of thinking, steeped as it is in
Reason. Can East and West be brought
together in this matter, or are these fundamentally different views of the
world? Well try this.
There is a single Reality which we all inhabit, so there is only
one 'true' answer to the most basic question of all 'What's happening?'. Each of us has struggled to answer this
question, and also the secondary questions that it spawns: 'What am I? Who am
I? Where did I come from? What do I want? What should I do? What is the good
life?' We each come up with different
answers, but these answers must be fairly close to the 'true' answers, close to
the single Reality, otherwise they wouldn't work, they wouldn't be any use to
us. As we grow older, we grow up; our
Model gets better, closer to Reality.
And thus the sets of answers we each give grow closer to each
other. We can posit, then, a perfect
human, who has got all the answers right.
Anyone else who got the answers right would also be perfect. The behaviour and personality of these
perfect humans would be indistinguishable; to all intents and purposes they
would be a single person. The fact that
this person has several bodies scattered around the globe and throughout the
centuries is an irrelevance.
This seems to be the state toward which we are each struggling,
with varying degrees of success. Our
growth toward it can be expressed in one of two ways: either we are getting to
know our true selves better, or we are changing our selves for the better. Either way, our perception our selves
changes, so the two views are in a sense equivalent.
Is there any evidence for the fundamental
sameness of humans which is of a more scientific nature, which would satisfy
our sceptical, Western, Reason-bound minds.
I think so. It is based upon
genetics, evolution, and the parallels between the evolution of the universe,
of life, and of the human mind.
A great deal has been written about evolution, especially in the
last few decades, and there is now a prevailing orthodoxy which I will attempt
to summarise here (rather tersely I'm afraid).
The theory of evolution attempts to answer the question 'How did life develop
into the myriad of complex organisms we see today?' The theory can also be used
to attack a related problem: 'How did life arise?' This is a far more
problematic question, and, for me at least, it is the most interesting. What is the Origin of Life? You might suppose that the question of the
origin of life is a fundamentally different one to that of its development into
complex forms - but I beg to differ - more later!
Given that life has already originated, then, and that primitive
micro-organisms, perhaps somewhat akin to today's bacteria, are floating about
in the primeval oceans, it is uncontroversial (at least amongst scientists!)
that the theory of evolution explains how these creatures, over several billion
years and several billion generations, turned into us.
The theory goes something like this. Each organism reproduces by 'copying itself', producing a new
generation. But the copying, although
pretty good, is not quite perfect. The
next generation is always very slightly different to the current one, and each
member of the next generation is very slightly different to all the other
members. The difference need only be a
fraction of a percentage difference in the observable characteristics of the
organism. For instance, individuals
might vary in size, weight, speed of response to certain stimuli (light, heat,
predators). And it is an entirely
random variation, so the 'copying errors' might be 'for the worse' or 'for the
better'. To get a handle on this idea,
the concept of 'fitness' is used. This
is a theoretical measure of the sum total of all an individual's
characteristics, of how well it does, how successful it is. In practical terms, one might use the number
of offspring the organism produces as a measure of fitness (provided the
offspring were healthy and were themselves capable of reproducing).
Now we introduce a new factor into the equation; the scarcity of
resources. There just isn't enough of
everything to go round; not enough space, air, light, water, food -
anything. Whatever the organism needs
there is bound to be a finite supply of it (the planet is finite) and sooner or
later it will get used up. In the early
years of the Earth's life, there was probably far less than there is now, since
it seems that the relative abundance of resources which we currently enjoy was
actually brought about by living things themselves. Because resources were scarce, there would have been competition
for them, and in such a contest, as in any contest, there would have been
winners and losers. In the game of
life, the prizes for the winners are survival and reproductive success. The winners are, of course, the organisms
that are most fit; in fact that was how I defined fitness, as reproductive
success. The phenomenon has come to be
known as 'the survival of the fittest'.
This is a neat enough term, but it does give the impression that only
the fit survive, which is misleading.
Though I suppose 'the greater reproductive success of the fitter' is a
bit of a mouthful.
What I have been describing here is the process of natural
selection. This is simply the process
by which competition for scarce resources leads to the 'selection' of winners,
in other words to the greater success of the fitter organisms. The term parallels artificial selection as
employed by plant and animal breeders to create new strains, varieties and
breeds of rose, dog or horse. That
natural selection might work at all is evidenced by the fact that artificial
selection certainly does - hundreds of breed of dog have been produced in just
a few hundred years. Evolution has had
millions of years to perform the more exacting job of breeding completely new
species and organisms.
Central to the theory of evolution is that the variation between
generations and individuals is completely random. Organisms are not trying to produce offspring which are somehow
better than they are, its just that they can't help producing offspring that
are different. It is impossible to say
exactly which characteristics might render any given individual more fit than
any other in any given ecological theatre, and it is impossible to say what
sort of competition the organism can expect.
But some competitors are bound to be better than others, and thus any
and all of the characteristics they possess will be selected for. There are a number of general features that
any organism must possess, though, just to 'qualify' for the competition. Presumably, if they possessed these feature
to a greater degree than the competitors, they would be fitter as a result. The sort of things I am thinking of are the
acuity and range of the senses, the speed of response to predators, the range
of potential food sources, adaptability to environmental conditions (light,
heat, water), and so on.
In the ecological arena, when a single organism has won its
ground, it is said to occupy an ecological niche. Such niches are opening up all the time as the geology and
climate of the planet change, and as organisms themselves change. New species arise to exploit these new niches,
to milk the situation, as it were. Once
a possible niche develops, it is only a matter of time before some
adventitious, opportunistic organism leaps into it and tries to make a go of
it. If it is successful, a new species
develops, and this in itself alters the ecological pattern creating further
possibilities and more niches. Once a
niche has been successfully exploited, the organism will remain there, changing
only very slightly if at all, for as long as the niche remains. There will be no selection pressure, no
competition, once the optimal solution has been evolved. This is an ideal state, of course, which is
never actually achieved. There is
always a sort of 'drift' in the requirements of the niche which the its
exploiter will need to keep up with if it is not to become extinct.
The evolution of complex multicellular organisms seems to have
occurred by a process of successive symbiosis.
Symbiosis is the association of two distinct organisms for their mutual
benefit. The simplest example I can
think of is lichen, which is a symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. In the primeval seas, simple bacteria-like
cells (probably photosynthetic) may well have formed 'teams', groups of 'bacteria'
which pooled their resources. Such a
team might eventually evolve into a much larger cell, a sort of proto-amoeba,
the ancestor of multicellular organisms.
Some proto-amoeba retained their photosynthetic capability and evolved
into plants, others lost theirs and evolved into animals, which basically
consumed the plants rather than bothering to collect sunlight themselves. They could also consume each other, of
course, so the concept of predator and prey would have evolved. Eventually, the animal (and plant) cells
themselves would have formed 'teams', producing proto-plankton. In these tiny creatures, some of the cells
would have 'specialised' to provide movement, or sensitivity (to light or
vibration say). Such specialised cells
would then evolve into tissues and organs, as the creatures became larger and
more complex.
Eventually, after many millions of years, a creature evolved with
a backbone, the first vertebrate. The
possession of an internal skeleton would have been a tremendous advantage, much
better than the hard shells of more primitive animals, which made growth very
difficult, yet providing the necessary rigidity for the use of muscles. These sea-going vertebrates would have
developed into fish, which probably came in many varieties. One type of fish crawled out onto the shore,
becoming the first amphibian, able to breath air and water. True air breathers, reptiles, then
developed. They were able to use the
direct sun to warm their bodies and their blood, greatly increasing the range,
speed and power of their movements. One
class of reptile took to the air, the birds, warm-blooded and protected from
the cold by their feathers. Another
class became the mammals, also warm blooded but protected by fur. Mammals retained their 'eggs' inside their
bodies so that when the egg 'hatched' they gave birth to live young; and they
developed mammary glands to feed the offspring on milk for the first few
weeks. Mammals became extremely diverse
and widespread, some became very large, some became pure carnivores, some took
to the trees. This last group, the
primates, developed into monkeys and apes and humans.
The development of vertebrates may not have involved symbiosis at
all. But the idea that 'many hands make
light work' seems to have come up many times, particularly in mammals which
often live in large extended family groups, tribes or societies. Like symbiosis, it is the idea of teamwork
which drives this; united they conquer.
One way of looking at human society is as an organism itself, a sort of
super-organism in which we are each an organ or a cell. But perhaps we should reserve the word
organism for individual bags of skin.
If organisms and societies are akin, it is because they are both prime examples
of a sort of self-regulating complex system, for which, to my knowledge, a term
has not yet been devised.
A complete understanding of the evolution of today's living
systems is not possible without a parallel understanding of the mechanism by
which all living individuals develop from an egg to an adult, and by which
those eggs, the next generation, are produced.
The same mechanism is used by all species on the planet; it is based on
a fundamental unit of biological inheritance - the gene.
All life on Earth shares a common origin, and this is evidenced by
the common mode of reproduction of all organisms. All organisms are composed of cells. The nucleus of each cell contains the chromosomes, the genetic
blueprint for that organism. Each
chromosome is made up of thousands of genes.
For any given individual, from an amoeba to a human, whether made of one
cell or billions, every cell in its body contains an identical set of
chromosomes, an identical set of genes.
No other individual will possess exactly this set of genes; it uniquely
characterises the individual organism.
This set of genes is called its genotype. Each gene determines a characteristic of the organism, sometimes
by itself alone but more often in concert with one or more other genes - a gene
cluster. In fact I shall use the word
gene to imply both a single gene and a cluster. Often a gene determines more than one characteristic. The use of the word 'determines' should not
be taken to mean that gene absolutely determines a feature, since the
expression of a gene (how it works) involves interaction with the
environment. But other things being
equal, the gene is the main determinant; in particular it is the determinant
upon which evolution acts. One more
technical term: the set of characteristics which is the complete expression of
the genotype is called the organism's phenotype.
The reason every cell in the body contains an identical set of
genes is that the cells are all direct descendants of a single cell. This is the common mode of reproduction of
all organisms: to produce a single cell which is then the embryo for a
completely new organism, the offspring, the next generation. In the case of the amoeba, the embryo is the
organism 'fully grown' as it were. But
for more complex species, multi-cellular organism, the embryo is just the
beginning; it has to grow, to divide, to develop into the final form of the new
individual.
The cell first divides into two daughter cells, each with an
identical set of genes. This cell
division is accomplished by first duplicating each chromosome and then dealing
out one copy of each to the two new cell nuclei. The biochemistry of this duplication is startlingly beautiful.
Chromosomes turn out to be made of stuff called DNA (Deoxyribo
Nucleic Acid). The structure of DNA was
worked out in the 1950s. It was found
to be a very large molecule indeed, an enormously long chain of sub-units
called bases. Each chromosome is a
single molecule of DNA, and a gene is simply a region along its length, a
relatively short sequence of bases.
There are four bases, which we can label using their initial letters as
A, C, G and T. They occur in about
equal proportions, strung out along the long DNA chain like beads upon a
necklace. However, they do not form a
fixed pattern; there is no repeating sequence, as one might find in, say, a
wallpaper pattern. Rather they are
'randomly' distributed along the chain; I use the quotes because the
distribution is not entirely random - it is more akin to the distribution of
letters in a section of English text. The sequence of bases is actually storing information. A gene is like a long sentence, the words of
which are made up from the four bases; what the sentence actually says I will
explain shortly.
It turns out that DNA is not just one chain of bases, it is two
chains, wrapped around each other in a tight embrace, the double helix. It is rather like a ladder twisted into a
spiral staircase; the sides of the ladder are the two chains, and the rungs are
formed by the pairing of the bases along each chain. This is the real beauty of it.
Each base will only pair with one other base; C pairs with G, and A with
T. This means that the sequence of
bases on one strand of the DNA is matched by a complementary sequence on the
other strand; one strand is a positive copy, the other a negative. For instance, a the positive sequence ACGT
will only pair with the negative sequence TGCA. This provides for a delightfully simple way to duplicate the
entire molecule, and thus the entire chromosome. The ladder splits 'up the middle' into its two separate strands,
one positive and one negative. Because
each base will only pair with one other base, each copy can reconstruct the
missing strand: the positive strand reconstructs its negative, and the negative
strand reconstructs its positive. (The
DNA itself doesn't do the reconstruction - there is quite complex molecular
machinery to do this - but it holds the information required to perform the
reconstruction.) The net result is two identical copies of the original double
helix, two identical chromosomes.
The cells of the embryo go on dividing into 4, 8, 16, 32 cells and
so on until there are millions of cells.
As the divisions proceed, the cells do not each remain of identical size
and shape forming a sort of amorphous blob.
Each cell or group of cells takes upon a different size and shape
depending upon where it is in the developing embryo. These individual distortions result in the whole embryo,
initially a spherical ball of cells, taking on a definite complex shape. The groups of cells carry on dividing, each
group developing into distinct layers, tissues and organs. There are two questions that need to be
addressed here: how does a cell 'know where it is' in the embryo? and, given that it does know, how does it
know what to do in that location? The
answer to the second question is easier (not least because its known!): Its all
in the genes. This is when most genes
act, during the development of the embryo; only a fraction of the genotype is
needed once the organism has developed.
How are genes expressed, how do they work? They act by synthesising proteins,
particularly enzymes. Protein molecules
are large molecules (but no where near the size of DNA). They are made up of chains of amino acids
which are wrapped up in a complicated 'ball of string' structure. There are 20 types amino acids to choose
from, and again they are not repetitively arranged along the protein chain; but
not randomly either. The exact sequence
of amino acid determines the structure of the protein, which itself determines
the function of the molecule. Proteins
are the biochemical workhorses of the cell, and they have a great many jobs to
do, and a great many roles to perform.
Enzymes form one of the most important classes of proteins; their job is
to control all the chemical reactions occurring in the cell.
Enzymes are catalysts. In
chemistry, a catalyst is an agent which takes part in a chemical reaction but
which is not consumed by it. In an
ordinary chemical reaction, like the burning of natural gas (methane) in air,
the reaction stops when one of the reagents (methane and oxygen) runs out. The reagents are turned into products
(carbon dioxide and water), they are consumed by the reaction. Whichever reagent is present in smallest
quantity will limit the extent of the reaction. A catalyst, although it is required to make a certain reaction
go, is not consumed by it; there is always just as much of the catalyst around
as there was at the start. This means
two things: one, as long as there is some of it around, the catalyst is never
the limiting factor; and two, you don't need a lot of it to keep the reaction
going. For the chemical reactions of
the cell, enzymes are the catalysts.
Each enzyme catalyses a single reaction, so if that enzyme is not
present, that reaction just doesn't go; but only a minute quantity of the right
enzyme is needed to trigger the reaction.
A set of enzymes defines a set of reactions, a sequence of reactions
known as a pathway, each pathway leading from some 'raw material' to some
desired 'product'.
Genes control the pathways of the cell by synthesising the right
set of enzymes at the right time to cause the production of certain specific
chemicals as they are needed. The genes
can be switched on or switched off as dictated by a sophisticated control
system the details of which are still unknown.
The actual mechanism of protein synthesis is complex, but I can
summarise it here. Each gene is a
sentence of DNA written in code (the genetic code). The code consists of three letter words, each letter being one of
the 4 bases, giving a 'dictionary' of 64 words. What each word 'means' is one of the 20 amino acids (some amino
acids are coded for by more than one word), or a bit of punctuation (start and
stop). The DNA of a single gene is
first 'transcribed' into RNA, a sort of single stranded version of DNA (only
the 'positive' DNA strand is transcribed).
The RNA is then 'translated' by a host of molecular machines called
ribosomes. Each ribosome starts at the
'start' word on the RNA and proceeds to the 'stop' word, translating each three
letter word in between into a single amino acid and stringing the amino acids
together. The net result is that each
ribosome produces a single 'polypeptide' or protein chain, potentially a single
enzyme.
We still haven't answered the first question, 'How do cells know
where they are?' Again, I shall present a simplified answer. Cells are able to detect the presence and
the concentration of chemicals in their immediate environment (this is in fact
another of the jobs that proteins do, this time as receptors wedged into the
outer covering of the cell, the cell membrane). The presence of a given concentration of a 'messenger' chemical
tells it where it is. The messenger
chemical is produced by neighbouring cells which already know where they are,
so to speak. This is a bit of a
'chicken and egg' problem, but its not as bad as it sounds. Since the initial ball of cells making up
the embryo is symmetrical, an arbitrary cell just decides where it is, and this
cell becomes the reference for all the others.
This is the general scheme, then: cells know where they are in the
embryo via the chemical messengers produced by their neighbouring cells. Knowing where it is, the cell responds by
doing the job a cell in that position is programmed to do. It does this by switching on the the right
genes to synthesise the right enzymes to get the right pathways going in order
to build up the right products.
(Probably, the messenger chemical switches on a single 'master gene'
which then switches on all the rest.) The effect of the enzymes (and other
proteins) is to alter the size and shape of the cell and the kind of substances
it takes in and gives out. The precise
details of how this scheme results in the development of an infant organism are
still a mystery. The point is all the
information, the plans, the instructions are held by the genes; they are in
control of the cell.
How does this genetic mechanism relate to evolution? Well for one thing, the fact that the
mechanism is completely general and common to all living things implies that
all life evolved from a single common origin which had already perfected this
mechanism. How that mechanism itself
arose is the problem of the Origin of Life (see the next section). But more importantly, the genetic mechanism
provides continuity; in a sense it is the genes that do the evolving, not the
organism. It is not individual
organisms that evolve, it is the 'germ line', as it used to be known; genes
passed on from generation to generation, which have lifetimes measured in
millions of years, not the few tens of years that even the longest lived
organisms attain. Most of the genes of
modern organisms are very ancient indeed, some have been around for billions of
years.
The genes outlive individual organisms since they are passed on to
the next generation in the single cell from which the embryo develops. Most organisms reproduce sexually; a male
donates his sperm, and the female her egg, and these fuse to form the embryo
cell. Why, then, doesn't the number of
chromosomes double with each generation?
Because there is a trick involved in the production of the sperm and egg
(the gametes). Each ordinary cell, the
non-gametes, contains two copies of each chromosome. When the gametes are created by the division of a parent cell,
the chromosomes do not duplicate, but one of each of the pair is dealt to each
daughter cell, so gametes rather than having several pairs of chromosomes have
only one of each. When the gametes
fuse, the situation is restored, the embryo cell has a set of chromosome pairs,
one of the pair from the male, one from the female. So there are actually two copies of every gene in a cell!
It is not quite accurate to say 'two copies of each gene in every
cell' since this implies that they are identical copies. Well the genes might be identical, but they
don't have to be, and frequently they are not.
One gene came from the mother and the other from the father, two
different organisms, two different genotypes.
But if each of a pair of chromosomes contains a set of different genes,
in what sense are the chromosomes the same, and in what sense are genes that
make them up the same? Take a human
cell: it has 46 chromosomes. The huge
DNA molecule that comprises each one is bundled up into a compact package so
that under a microscope, the chromosomes look like so many sets of overalls. But they vary in size and shape, such that
you can arrange them in 23 pairs, where each one of the pair looks like the
other one, but unlike any of the others.
The genes on each chromosome are not randomly scattered: it is as if
each one has an address where it is expected to be found, and this address is
known as its locus. What we mean when
we say there are two copies of each gene, is that there are two alternative
loci, one on each of the paired chromosomes, to which the cell can go to find
the gene. The two genes are called
alleles of each other. If both alleles
have identical DNA sequences, then the genes are the same; no problem. But if one of the alleles has a slightly
different sequence, say just one of the bases is different, then they are
different genes. In other words, its
product would have a different amino acid at some point in its polypeptide
chain, an 'imperfect' protein. So now there is a problem - which allele should
be expressed?
Imagine all the chromosomes from one cell of an organism laid out
in pairs, end to end, with the DNA unravelled; it would form an enormously long
corridor, or street with corresponding loci (addresses) facing each other
across it so that each gene lived opposite its allele (for example, number 3215
West would live opposite 3215 East).
Imagine a single species as a town containing row upon row of identical
streets (residences), where each street is an individual member of that species
(numbered for convenience 1st Street, 2nd Street, and so on). Each individual has a unique genotype,
corresponding to each street having a unique set of residents. Now each gene not only has an allele living
opposite on the same street, it also has alleles living at the same address on
all the other streets. If genes
replicated perfectly, every allele would be the same; in fact there wouldn't be
a concept of alleles since every individual would just have two identical
copies of the same gene. But, as we
shall see shortly, mistakes are made.
The majority of the residents of any particular address (locus) turn out
to the same, a single allele, and this gene is called the wild type, but many
are different, different alleles, and they are known as mutations. So in a population of a species every locus
has a set of alleles, a wild type and several mutations, which can occupy it.
Back to the question of which of the two alleles of a single
chromosome pair is expressed. If an
individual is lucky enough to have a wild type allele resident, then it is that
gene that is expressed; we say that the wild type is dominant over the
mutations. If neither locus is occupied
by a wild type, then one of the mutations is expressed. Remember that each gene codes for a protein,
which might well be essential for the correct development and survival of the
individual. As long as the wild type
gene is present, the correct protein can be produced, and the individual is
okay. The cell seems to be able to
detect an 'okay' protein, which explains how dominance works. But if both alleles are defective, only
defective proteins are produced.
Depending upon which protein it is, this can be good, producing say
blonde hair or blue eyes; or bad, producing a genetic disease like Down's
Syndrome or Muscular Dystrophy.
If random mutation is the only way that genes can ever change,
then from what I've said above, it doesn't look too good for evolution. It seems as if any change to the genes, any
mutations of the wild type that arise, are going to be compensated for by
dominance (the other allele in the cell is likely to be the wild type); or, if
not, they are likely to disable the individual. Well this is quite true, the majority of mutations will be
unfavourable, often lethal. But a tiny
proportion will not be; they will either be benign, having no effect on the
phenotype at all, or they will be favourable, an improvement, a minute increase
in fitness. To see how this can happen,
and why it is so rare, we have to look at the mechanism of mutation.
There are two classes of mutation. Point mutations involve the swapping, addition, or deletion of a
single base in the DNA sequence comprising the gene. Area mutations involve whole strings of bases being added,
deleted or even inverted. Any given
gene can have none, one or more mutations along its length. The mutations arise by one of two means:
imperfect duplication of the DNA, or damage to the DNA from chemical agents or
radiation. However they have arisen,
how they affect the individual depends crucially on exactly where the resultant
protein is affected. A large part of
the protein is 'structural', it is just a sort of frame to support the
'business end' which does the work. As
long as the shape of the frame doesn't alter, it doesn't matter too much which
amino acids make it up. So for any
given amino acid in the frame, there are one or two others that could be
substituted without unduly affecting the function of the protein. Mutations affecting the 'business end' will
almost always destroy the function, and random mutations to the frame are quite
likely to substitute the wrong amino acid too, distorting the shape and
destroying the effectiveness of the protein; this is why most mutations would
be harmful. But a small percentage will
have little or no effect. An even
smaller percentage will have a beneficial effect.
The chances that a positive evolutionary step will occur depend
upon whether the protein can potentially be 'improved' or not, and this depends
upon the context in which the protein operates: the particular chemical
pathway, the particular cell, the tissue or organ affected, and the circumstances
of the organism, including the environment, the ecological niche itself. For sake of argument, lets assume that if
one particular amino acid were replaced by just one of the other 19 kinds of
amino acid, the enzyme would be 'better', say by giving an animal sharper
vision. The chances of that particular
mutation actually happening are probably worse than one in a million; but given
thousands of members of the species and thousands of generations, its bound to happen
one day. When it arose, the mutant
gene, far from being masked by the wild type, would actually be 'better' than
it. In fact one would expect the mutant
to successfully 'compete' with the wild type, and with all the other alleles,
and eventually become the most common allele, the wild type, itself.
There is a third type of mutation that I haven't talked about
yet. As well as point and area
mutations which occur with a single gene, sometimes whole regions of a
chromosome containing many genes are duplicated. Exactly what effect this has depends upon which genes they are
and upon whether the control system of the cell can cope with it. In effect, instead of having two alleles for
a given locus, the cell now has three, or rather it has a 'bogus' allele living
at a 'bogus' address, a new locus. It
is an interesting question as to whether the cell recognises the locus from its
physical position 'along the street' or whether it recognises it from some
sign, a special 'marker' sequence near the locus, analogous to the name or
number of a house in the street. If the
latter, then the new locus will house a genuine third allele! In any case, as long as the extra genes do
not cause any problems, if the mutation is 'benign', if the control system can
cope, then the new region will not be selected against; it will have a free
ride on the chromosome.
Once the new locus has been created, even if only on one
chromosome at the moment, it becomes subject to selection pressure. What's going to happen if it mutates? There are still the 'normal' alleles, one of
them probably a wild type, so this may not affect an existing pathway. But there may be some new protein being
produced which is bound to have some effect, possibly deleterious, on the cell. If it can be switched off, well and
good. If it escapes the control system,
and creates havoc in the cell, too bad for the individual - it's inherited a
lethal gene, but at least the lethal will be removed from the population. Again, though, there is just a small chance
that the new protein is beneficial. If
so, it becomes a new gene, and if organisms that possess it are actually
fitter, the gene will again flood the population. So here we have a mechanism for the creation of brand new genes:
duplicate an old one and mutate it so that it is under separate selection
pressure. By such means the genotype
grows in size and complexity as opposed to merely getting better at doing the
same thing, which would happen if the number of active loci never changed.
Its all very well to say 'look at this wonderful genetic mechanism
which is the basis of evolution' but aren't we back to the chicken and egg
again: How did the genetic mechanism itself evolve? This is really part of a larger question which I will look at in
the next section: What is the Origin of Life?
The exposition I have given so far has perhaps given the
impression that evolution only works because there is a genetic mechanism for
it to act upon. This is not the
case. The genetic mechanism itself was
created by evolution. One way to look
at it is that genetics is the way evolution manifests itself when it is acting
upon carbon chemistry, but that it also acts upon other systems where it
manifests itself in different, though analogous, ways. Before genetics got going, other chemical
systems must have been evolving at the same time with which genetics, the DNA
system, competed exactly as species compete today. The other systems became extinct, genetics won, as it were. How might this genetic mechanism have been
created?
Obviously we can't go back and see what was going on 3 billion
years ago. We can only study the
subject theoretically. But what's to
stop us developing fantasy theories which tell us nothing about Nature at
all? Well, we can use the few scraps
of evidence that have survived to the present day; we can perform chemical
experiments simulating early conditions; and we can use computer simulations or
models of early biochemistry to test out ideas. Clearly a judicious combination of all three techniques is in
order; the fossil record and the chemical investigations providing the
'milestones' and computer models filling in the gaps in between. There would have to be a lot of assumptions
made, though, and how justified they were would depend upon how well the models
worked and whether the fossil and chemical evidence supported them. The full program has not yet been carried
out but bits and pieces have been done and I will attempt to summarise these
findings here.
The 'primeval soup' probably consisted of a water sea and a
methane and ammonia atmosphere. Heat
generated by volcanic activity and lightning may have caused locally high
temperatures in the sea and air which drove chemical reactions leading to the
synthesis of amino acids and nucleic bases, the building blocks of life. Experiments in the lab have proved that
conditions similar to those which existed 3 billion years ago can produce these
building blocks.
In the last section I discussed chemical catalysis, the action of
certain agents which cause chemical reactions to occur but are not consumed by
them. In the vast chemical experiment
being performed in the primeval ocean, it seems likely that many catalysts
would have been around, simple chemical compounds possibly formed out of the
metallic oxides in rock minerals. These
catalysts would have been very non-specific so any sort of reactions might have
been catalysed. Its possible, though,
that some catalyst might have occurred which catalysed the formation of long
chains of amino acids. We can suppose
that this is quite likely to have happened, in fact. From what we know of carbon chemistry (also called 'organic
chemistry'), long chains, or polymers are the order of the day; indeed they are
the basis of the plastics industry. Amino acids are carbon compounds, and they can form chains if they
can be linked together ('polymerised') via a common carbon reaction which forms
peptide bonds. The resulting chain is
called a polypeptide, in other words a protein. Our first assumption, then, is that some chemical catalyst arose
which polymerised amino acids into small proteins.
This brings about an interesting possibility. Proteins are catalysts themselves;
potentially better, more specific catalysts than inorganic ones. In the modern cell, such proteins (enzymes)
are tailor made for the job, though.
Their structure and catalytic ability is a direct result of the
particular sequence of the amino acids they possess. In the early world, the sequence of amino acids would have been
entirely random, so whatever catalytic ability the first polypeptides possessed
would have been random too - they would catalyse no reaction at all or else any
reaction. Can we construct a plausible
sequence of events which might lead to the creation of a polypeptide which
actually catalysed the synthesis of polypeptides themselves? I shall attempt to.
Stage one, as we have seen, would be the synthesis of random
polypeptides by inorganic catalysis.
Just by chance, some of these polypeptides would have had the ability to
catalyse the polymerisation of amino acids.
Equally likely is the formation of polypeptides which catalyse their own
breakdown. No pattern has emerged yet,
the situation is unstable. All we have
is a collection of random polypeptides, catalysing random reactions. This is stage two. Stage three would be the chance formation of a polypeptide which
actually catalysed its own synthesis!
How likely is such an event? The
sort of thing I have in mind is that a simple polypeptide, possibly formed out
of just a single kind of amino acid (which might occur where the concentration
of that amino acid is high), might catalyse its own synthesis. For example, lets say we found out from lab
experiments that a polymer of the amino acid alanine, polyalanine, catalysed
the polymerisation of alanine (I've no idea whether it does, this is just an
illustration). We could them suppose
that if in a local concentration of alanine in the primeval sea a single
molecule of polyalanine arose, it would bring about the synthesis of more
polyalanine, leading to a local 'colony' of polyalanine. Any spare alanine would be rapidly 'gobbled
up' by the polyalanine, and the destructive effects of other polypeptides,
which breakdown the polyalanine, would effectively countered by the
overwhelming numbers of 'repairer' molecules, polyalanine itself.
This system is probably too simple, but it gives the general
idea. More complex systems would be
more likely to be stable, though less likely to arise. But if they are likely at all, then once
they had happened they would be stable, they would persist, a new order would
have been created. What might have
happened is that small sets of polypeptides arose, where each chain is made up
of simple sequences of amino acids (..ABCABCABC..), and where each type of
molecule catalyses one particular bond (A to B, B to C, or C to A). The set would be stable, and in fact would
propagate throughout the 'soup', using up all the available molecules of amino
acids A, B and C. In other words the
set would survive, and it would replicate.
Many such sets would be possible, some 'better' than others, competing
for the available amino acids.
The point I'm trying to make is that by entirely random, and
entirely chemical means, stable sets of proteins might arise and propagate
throughout the soup of raw material.
Now here is something for evolution to work on. There is stability, and propagation - the
cornerstones of evolution. There is
even something extra, a third cornerstone if you like, namely variation. Each protein set cannot 'copy' itself
perfectly, mistakes creep in, in fact the copying fidelity of a set of proteins
would probably be very poor. The
chances are that many of the 'progeny' of a protein set would not be stable an
so that line would die out. But some
lines would be just as stable, perhaps more so. In fact the greater the fidelity the better; the evolution of
fidelity is favoured. And new sets
might be 'better' in other ways too, perhaps at scavenging, or breaking down
rival sets. As long as the resources
are scarce (and if they aren't the population just grows until they are), there
will be competition - and this is the fourth cornerstone.
The question arises, Is it life?
Clearly it is not life as we know it.
Where are the organisms? There
are no discrete collections of molecules, just a mixed up soup of proteins,
where certain local mixtures (sets) are more stable than others. There are no generations, no genetic
material, no cells. Perhaps it isn't
life; but it is evolution. The process
of evolution didn't wait for the creation of a genetic mechanism before it
'started up' - it was going all the time.
In fact it was by evolution that the genetic mechanism was created in
the first place. The story I have told
above is a sort of fable, an illustration of how chemical order might plausibly
arise out of chaos. By such steps, the
degree of order inevitably increases, because that's how evolution works; the
more ordered a configuration is, the more stable it is, longer it
persists. Order will always arise out
of chaos. Evolution is not dependant
upon organisms, proteins or DNA; as long as a system is complex enough to
permit stability, propagation, variation and competition, evolution will
occur. I suggest that any system worthy
of the name possesses these attributes, so any system will evolve order. Life on Earth has evolved at a relatively
high rate (though it seems very slow in human terms) and this is probably due
to the presence of liquid water here, and the constant input of heat and light
from the sun. Perhaps these are optimal
conditions for rapid evolution, but there is no evidence for this. It seems entirely possible to me that
complex systems have evolved elsewhere in the universe in completely alien
conditions and possible at a greater rate than on Earth. It is a puzzle, though, why we haven't met
them yet!
I still haven't really answered the question of how the genetic
system evolved, the single 'organism' from which all life on Earth today has
developed. Obviously I don't actually
know how it evolved, but I can use the ideas presented in this section to put
together a plausible account.
The protein sets that I invented above have their counterpart in
terms of nucleic acid sets. RNA has
catalytic ability too. It may be that
many mechanisms are possible based upon long chains of sub-units catalysing
their own polymerisation, and proteins and RNA are just two examples. What is evolving is a system of information
storage. The sequence of units, amino
acids or bases, determines what reactions are catalysed and how well the
polymers catalyse them. The stability
and survival of the protein and RNA sets depends upon the preservation and improvement
of these sequences. I suspect that the
two independent systems, after some time evolving independently, possible in
competition with each other, somehow got together, a sort of primitive
symbiosis. Once a protein-RNA set
evolved, the door was open for the development of more sophisticated mechanism
of replication.
One of the secrets of symbiosis is called 'the division of
labour'; each half of the partnership does what they do best, relying on the
other half to perform the remaining functions.
For purely chemical reasons, proteins are the better catalysts, and RNA
is better at replication. But for this
division to work, the amino acid sequences would have to be somehow recorded in
the base sequences and a mechanism for translating a base sequence to a protein
sequence perfected. In other words, the
protein-RNA set would have to evolve a ribosome. This seems a daunting task when you realise how complex the
ribosomal mechanism is today, but presumably the modern ribosome is only the
end result of a long and tortuous process of small improvements from virtually
no beginning, just as the evolution of any system is. One can imagine the early translation mechanisms were very
different, moving through a series of intermediate stages before settling down
to the ribosomal system. In any event,
once a translation machine, a proto-ribosome, evolved, the union of RNA and
protein would have been assured.
The proto-ribosomes are the beginnings of a kind of organism. But they are not well defined; the products
of translation, the proteins, diffuse away into the sea. The chances of the right proteins and RNA
getting together to make another proto-ribosome are not high. It would be better if a local concentration
of polymers could be maintained; a cell.
The boundary of a cell is a simple structure, a membrane composed of a
single type of molecule called a lipid.
Lipids are related to soap molecules, and solutions of them in water
automatically form into lipid sacks, rather like soap bubbles.
Perhaps a protein set which also produced lipids, as a sort of
by-product, found itself trapped in the bubbles. The bubble-set and the proto-ribosomes might then have formed a
new symbiosis, a proto-cell.
Once the proto-cell developed it would have propagated very
quickly. The higher concentration of
translation products in the lipid sack would mean that proto-ribosomes would be
created very quickly. When the raw
materials ran out, the sack would have burst, releasing ribosomes to form new
proto-cells. As long as the RNA
molecules which coded for the ribosomes, but which replicated without the need
for ribosomes, were present in enough numbers, associations of RNA, ribosome
and lipid sack would form a new stable set.
Eventually, the proto-cell developed the trick of 'sucking in' the
surrounding sea and raw materials so that it didn't have to burst but just grew
in size and then split in two; the association of RNA, ribosome and lipid cell
would never again have to break up - a true organism would have evolved. Eventually the many RNA molecules, which may
not have been particularly stable, came to be transcribed from a single master
copy. The master copy was stabilised by
being a double strand of RNA (a master copy with its 'negative' attached). This wasn't as stable as DNA, obtainable
from RNA by the loss of a single oxygen atom from each base unit. RNA could be transcribed just as easily from
DNA. And there it is; the genetic
mechanism.
What I have described is a huge oversimplification. I haven't mentioned, for instance, how a
mechanism might arise by which the sun's light is trapped as 'chemical' energy;
photosynthesis. And the details of the
many steps involved pose enormous problems.
But all I am trying to do is sketch a solution, offer a glimpse of it,
in order to illustrate that the evolution of genetics proceeded in the same
step by step way that the evolution of organisms proceeded thereafter. Genetics itself hasn't evolved substantially
for billions of years because it is already 'perfect', which is to say it does
its job superbly well and it is completely relied upon as the basis of all
life; any significant change to it would almost certainly be lethal to the
individual originating it.
This excursion to the dawn of life was really just to illustrate
the point that evolution is not fundamentally a biological phenomenon; it is
not exhibited solely by living organisms but by all complex systems. It happens that life is the most complex
system, and the most common example of evolution; but, as I shall explain next,
evolution is a truly Universal phenomenon.
In the first three sections of Part 3 I have given a thumbnail
sketch of the origin of life from a chemical soup, and of the origin of Man
from the first 'proto-cell' in which the genetic mechanism had been perfected. This account is by no means intended to be
authoritative, or even accurate in any detail.
It is just a model of how things might have happened which is an
illustration of the evolutionary principle.
One point it should emphasis is that evolution is not aiming at any
particular solution, it is not a conscious 'force'. It is blind, mechanical, undirected and lacking in
intelligence. It is not a true force at
all, but more a law not unlike the laws of motion or of thermodynamics.
There are two laws of thermodynamics. The first law is really a law of physics: it states that in a
closed system energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy is equivalent to matter, and one can
be turned into the other, but the sum total of the two together is
constant. The second law is a bit more
tricky to explain. One way to put it is
that the entropy of a system increases with time. But what is entropy? It
is simply the degree of disorder in a system, its 'randomness', how chaotic it
is.
If we put the two laws together we can see that although the total
amount of energy in a system stays the same, an increasing proportion of it
becomes random; another term for random energy is heat. Heat is simply the random motion of
molecules; they are all dancing about full of (random) energy. This is clear in a gas or a liquid where the
molecules are free to move, but is equally so in a solid where each atom,
though caged in by its neighbours, still manages to shake around a little. Temperature is a measure of the 'average'
energy of the molecules (some will inevitably have more than others);
individual molecules don't have an individual temperature, just energy; or,
more obviously, motion. This heat
energy is essentially 'lost' energy.
Because all the molecules are moving randomly in all directions, the
motion can't be 'harnessed' in any way; in the jargon, it is not 'available to
do work'; it is not useful energy.
Energy is only useful if all the molecules are moving in the same
direction: water flowing downhill, a cannonball flying through the air, a
spring uncoiling. Heat can only be used
if, rather like water, its is allowed to flow; not from high to low, but from
hot to cold. For example, the burning
of petrol in the cylinder of a car engine creates heat, but it is only any use
if the heat is allowed to 'go somewhere'; in this case it goes into the
expansion of the gas in the cylinder (which rapidly cools as a result) by
pushing the piston down, driving the wheels round, and moving the car.
A car is only about 20% efficient: 80% of the energy released by
the burning petrol is not converted into the movement of the car, but into
heating up the exhaust gases. It might
be possible to make an engine 80% efficient, so that you only lost 20% as heat,
but you could never make it 100% efficient.
If you could you would be contradicting the second law; the randomness
(entropy) of the system must increase, some random energy (heat) must be
produced.
Underlying thermodynamics, which is the study of heat flow, is
statistical mechanics, treating heat as the sum of the motion of
molecules. The point is that the second
law is a purely statistical idea. Any
system left on its own (that's what we mean by 'closed' - we don't put anything
into it) will simply get more random and chaotic. This is actually quite a common experience. Imagine a jar of sweets: the bottom third
red sweets, the middle third white sweets, the top third air. Shake the jar vigorously for a minute or two
- what happens? I think you'd be rather
surprised if the sweets still formed a red and white layer. In fact, they get completely mixed up, and
no amount of shaking is going to unmix them.
It is just a matter of probability.
Once its been shaken, the chance that any individual sweet in the jar is
red and not white is just 50:50, so the chances that you would find all red
sweets in the bottom is the same as tossing a coin (a fair coin) a hundred odd
times and coming up with heads every time.
Its not impossible, but it is very, very unlikely; so for practical
purposes it is zero.
Many phenomena are 'driven' by the increase in entropy. Any form of mixing involves it, any change
from order to disorder. The flow of
heat from hot to cold (mixing hot and cold molecules); mixing milk in tea;
having to constantly tidy up a house (which 'naturally' tends to get
untidy). It is as if any irreversible
process is driven by entropy, as if it accounted for the existence of change,
as if entropy was the definition of Time itself. All biological processes, all energy systems and chemical
reaction, involve heat flow, so they are 'driven' by entropy. Without entropy things would stay the same;
no change, no Time. But the price to
pay for having Time at all (which is to say for existence) is that things
always run down, heat is always lost, an energy input is always required. We need food to keep us going, to replace
the energy we keep losing as heat, and also to repair all the damage we keep
doing to ourselves both outside and inside, even within our cells. Movement, for which we also need energy, is
almost the last on the list! This is
literally so for plants, which don't move.
The point is that organisms are ordered systems, but they are not
free from the second law. They have to
pay for their order by producing even more disorder - heat. They are energy systems and they need a
constant input of energy to meet the demanding entropy bill. They want to remain stable, to survive, to
keep going; so they are always back pedalling, resisting the force of nature
which is trying to change them, to run them down, to wear them out; they are
fighting Time.
But how on Earth did such a system of order come about? Surely things are supposed to get more
disordered, more chaotic? Isn't that what
the second law is about? The point is
that the system as a whole does get more disordered; life is just a tiny corner
of order in a chaotic world. It traps a
small fraction of the energy coming from the sun, and in order to make use of
that energy it has to give most of it to the environment as heat. But a fraction of a fraction of the energy
does something useful; it creates and maintains order - Life. And the order has increased in size and
complexity under the action of the process of Universal Evolution. It is as if evolution were acting in the
opposite direction to the second law, going from chaos to order rather than the
reverse. To be sure, it is a tiny
back-current in the hurtling mainstream of entropy, a thin layer of order on
the surface of the Earth. But like
entropy, evolution is just a statistical thing, a matter of probabilities, a
mathematical phenomenon.
The fact that life must have arisen from a purely chemical soup,
as illustrated in the previous three sections, is evidence that evolution is
mathematical in nature. Chemical
reactions obey mathematical laws, not biological ones. Any chemical system changes toward a more
stable state, giving up energy as it does so, and releasing heat. It is analogous to water flowing downhill;
the water at the top of the hill is 'less stable' because it can, potentially,
flow down - it has 'potential energy'.
This energy can be released, and used to do work, by letting the water
flow downhill, perhaps over a water wheel.
Again, a lot of the energy is released as heat. At the bottom of the hill, the water has
less potential energy (at sea level it would have none, because it would have
nowhere lower to flow to) - it has lost the energy as heat or as work, turning
the water wheel. So for 'more stable'
you can read 'less energy', and this applies to chemical reactions too. When a system becomes more stable it
achieves a lower energy state, it loses energy as heat, and so the reaction is
driven by the second law.
However, this only describes the behaviour of the chemical system
as a whole, the closed system. Earth is
not a closed system because it has a constant supply of energy; the heat and
light coming from the sun. Any
particular region of the Earth (or the sea, which is where the action is) will
be heated and cooled in an irregular pattern as the Earth turns and the seasons
come and go. Sometimes there will be a
net flow of energy into a local region, sometimes a net flow of energy out. If the net flow is out, then only reactions
which release heat (flow downhill) will happen. But when the net flow is in, 'uphill' reactions occur, the local
entropy will decrease, a little bit of order will have arisen. It is these local decreases in entropy which
create the amino acid building blocks out of methane, ammonia and water, and
which later polymerise the amino acids into chains, and which provide the
energy (the ability to go uphill) for the whole of the evolutionary process I
have already described.
One of the great achievements of living systems was that they
developed a way to trap and store this local decrease in entropy. They did this by pushing some reactions
uphill to produce produce 'unstable' chemical compounds (they are 'energy
unstable' in that they have potential energy, but they are 'time stable' in
that they don't spontaneously decompose, at least not for some time). The first energy storage compounds were
probably the ones that most easily formed; almost anything will do if it
releases heat when it breaks down. But
as living chemical systems became more sophisticated, the storage compounds
became more efficient, and eventually settled on carbohydrates. The energy trapped was not in the form of
heat, but light direct from the sun, trapped via photosynthesis. And it came to be released from the
carbohydrate not directly as heat, but as chemical energy, by a process which
was almost the reverse of photosynthesis, namely respiration.
Whilst this explains to some extent how living systems do not
actually violate the second law, it doesn't explain why these local regions of
order develop and persist. We've
already seen that the answer to this is evolution, but what does that mean
mathematically; why doesn't absolutely everything become disordered? The answer lies in the constant input of
energy to the system from the sun. The
most probable event is that everything becomes disordered, order is very
unlikely. But because energy is
constantly being poured into the system the number of possible trials is
increased dramatically. If there is a
one in a million chance that a particular event will happen, perform a million
or so trials, and it happens. There is
a particular class of event, probably one in a million classes, which has the
remarkable property of propagation; once the event has happened to one element,
it rapidly happens to all the other elements.
It is as if the product of the event somehow attracted other similar
products to it, as if it catalysed their production.
In order for evolution to occur, what is needed is that the system
should move from one stable 'plateau' to another. A plateau is a special kind of stable state in which is capable
of 'repairing' itself. A plateau is a
higher energy state, it so it is unstable ('energy unstable') in that energy
could be released if it was allowed to breakdown. But its special stability ('time stability') comes from the fact
that if when a breakdown occurs to a part of it, that part is immediately
replenished from the main stock, by propagation. As long as energy is fed into the plateau, it can propagate and
repair itself, in spite of the fact that it is actually unstable, in other
words that it is ordered. The plateau
remains stable until another one-in-a-million event occurs which creates a new
plateau, a new stable state. Now the
odds are weighted in favour of the new plateau and the elements of the system
rapidly achieve the new configuration, 'catalysed' by the emerging new plateau,
as if it was capable of siphoning them up.
If these transitions from one plateau to another were actually
one-in-a-million events, evolution would occur painfully slowly, effectively
not at all. But evolution works at all
levels. Not only is evolution evolving
new plateaus, more ordered systems, fitter organisms, it is also evolving the
mechanism by which those system evolve!
The effect of this is to increase the chances that a plateau transition
will occur, to decrease the number of trials needed, and therefore to decrease
the time between jumps. For instance,
in the evolution of the genetic system, a mutation to a gene coding for, say, a
ribosomal protein (part of the genetic system) might enhance the function of
that protein, and thus render the organism 'fitter'. Improvements that might occur are to increase the rate of protein
synthesis, to increase the fidelity of DNA copying, to increase the variability
of offspring, to develop mechanisms to 'repair' lethal mutations, and so
on. One very clear example is the
evolution of sex itself. This proved to
be successful, probably for two reasons: because it dramatically increases the
variability of offspring; and because each offspring has two alleles for each
gene, so, if one of them is defective, there is a 'fall-back' copy.
The perfection of the genetic mechanism was one of the great
milestones in evolution, each improvement in it probably increased the rate of
evolution ten-fold. There are other
milestones too: the development of ribosomes, the formation of cells, the use
of DNA as the information store, photosynthesis, respiration, sex,
multicellular organisms, tissues, organs, movement, animals, blood, air
breathing, warm blood, nervous systems, brains. Each of these developments would have produced more and more fit
creature, exploiting ever more ecological niches, and themselves evolving at a
increasingly prodigious rates. Perhaps
the last of these major developments, the evolution of the brain, is the most
astounding since the development of the genetic mechanism itself. I think the creation of the brain, and its
'resident' the mind, was a master stroke (if such can be said of a blind force
of Nature!).
Movement had already evolved before nervous systems arose. But the early organisms moved in response to
stimuli, by direct reflex. The
'pathway' from stimulus to response was genetically coded into the animal's
cells; the connectivity between cells, the sensor cell and the motor cell, was
determined by genes. Even when nervous
systems became more sophisticated, their connectivity was still genetically
determined, in other words the behaviour of the animals was automatic and
instinctive. The development of these
instincts could only have occurred by evolution, at the same rate as the
development of a limb, or an eye: in other words slowly, over thousands of years
and tens of generations. The brain
changed all that. In effect the genes
handed over the day to day control of the animal to the mind. The genes set up the ground rules, the
'initial conditions', the urges that the mind will have to satisfy in order to
maintain its body and reproduce. But
once freed from the total control of the genes, the mind began to take on an
importance all of its own.
Behaviour is 'what an organism does'. Most often, the word is used to describe patterns of movement of
part or all of an animal (only animals move).
Changes in the organism which occur over long periods of time, such as
changes in size and shape, as in plants, are not considered to be movement, or
behaviour; thus growth is distinguished from behaviour. To some extent this is an arbitrary dividing
line. The habit of any organism, or
indeed any object, can be considered to constitute its behaviour. For inanimate objects, their behaviour (in
the short term) is rather straightforward - they just sit there and do
nothing. There are some exceptions,
notably water, the behaviour of which is far from straightforward. It performs an elaborate cycle of rain,
pools, streams, rivers, sea, evaporation, clouds, and rain again. This is an energy system, driven by the
sun. In fact even rocks, in the very
long term, form part of an energy system, this time the rock cycle, driven by
the interior heat of the Earth and the erosion caused by the water cycle. Change is a universal phenomenon; nothing is
unchanging or unmoving; but it may change and move very slowly so that only by
patient observation, recording, and some hard thinking can the change be
perceived. Water and air are fluids,
they flow easily, so their behaviour is easily observable - the weather. Rocks flow too, but much less easily. So the behaviour of the weather is more
easily observable than the behaviour of rocks.
Plants behave too, but slowly and less obviously than
animals. They change over days or years
by growing; a slow increase in the size and number of their cells. They have nothing equivalent to the muscle
cells of animals which can contract very rapidly. The most rapid movement they make, and therefore their most
obvious behaviour, is the opening and closing of flowers during the cycle of
day and night. But they are constantly
interacting with their environment, with the air and the soil, and they have
profound effects upon it. They are
performing a vital role, filling an ecological niche, they are conducting a
strategy all the time. Their behaviour
is their way of life; its what plants do.
They do it to ensure their own survival, the survival of their habit,
the survival of their particular niche, and thus the survival of their progeny.
But it is the behaviour of animals which is the most
interesting. The evolution of movement
was one of the great leaps forward in terms of biological fitness. The ability to actively search out new
supplies of food dramatically increased the sheer amount of food and energy
that an organism was capable of ingesting, which in turn increased the rate at
which they could move. Predation was
created; animals ate plants and other animals.
Speed of movement became at a premium for predator and prey alike. Many behaviours developed to cope with the
very problems that the possibility of movement itself created. But the evolution of movement brought with
it a related problem; how to control it.
Plants don't move, so speed of response is not a problem - they
can't respond quickly to anything. Changes in sunlight, humidity, soil nutrients, water and so on
tend to be slow anyway, so plants can respond in their own good time. This is just as well because whatever responses
they are capable of will be chemical ones and these are themselves slow. All a plant can do in response to an event is
to synthesise more or less of a given chemical. Chemical pathways are controlled by enzymes, which are controlled
by genes. But the genetic mechanism,
protein synthesis, is slow. It would
take the plant several minutes to produce any new proteins, and hours to
produce a significant amount. Well this
is no problem to plants, but certainly is to animals - they need an instant
response! So the first step evolution
had to take before animals could get off the ground (or out of it!) was to
develop fast response mechanisms. In
fact there would be some pressure for plants to respond more quickly to
environmental changes, such ability would make them more fit, and this is presumably
how animals first arose; through plants becoming faster, more animal-like.
How might faster responses be achieved? For purely chemical responses, two mechanisms have evolved. The first method involves storing up the
required chemicals within the cell in special sacks or vesicles. When a need arises for the chemical, the
vesicles release their contents to the cell or its exterior. The need is detected chemically, via
receptors on the cell surface which 'switch on' an enzyme that ruptures the
vesicles. This is a 'single shot'
method, though. Once the store of
chemical is depleted, the stocks will have to be replenished by fresh
synthesis, which will take some time.
One way round it is to have batteries of cells, each battery releasing
its stored chemical and then replenishing stocks whilst the other batteries
release their stock. The rate at which
the batteries can release chemical is then determined simply by their size, and
the organism will have to balance the cost of maintaining such a large 'gland'
to produce the chemical against the benefit it would give in terms of rapid
response. Can it afford it?
The second mechanism is rather more subtle and I shall have to
take a little time out here to provide some background. It is based on the regulation of enzymes by
a phenomenon called product inhibition.
Individual enzymes molecules work by converting input molecules, the
substrate, into output molecules, the product.
The first step is for the enzyme to bind to the substrate; in the second
step the enzyme changes the substrate into product; the third step is the
release of the product, leaving the enzyme free to bind to another
substrate. The enzyme binds to the
substrate because it has an affinity for it: the enzyme-substrate complex is
more stable than the two molecules being separate. However, once the enzyme has bound a substrate molecule, it is so
constructed that it causes the substrate to change; this is the chemical
reaction that the enzyme is designed to catalyse. The change is usually the splitting of the substrate or the
joining of two substrate molecules together.
Once so changed, the substrate has become the product. Just after it has been created, the product
is occupying the one site on the enzyme which binds to substrate. This complex
is stable because the enzyme will have a slight affinity for the product, since
it is very similar to the substrate.
Eventually the enzyme releases the product and is free to bind another
substrate. As long as there is a lot
more substrate than product around, this is fine. But what happens when the reaction has been going for a while,
and the amount of product has increased?
The enzyme is likely to bind to product rather than substrate, and the
more product there is, the more likely this is. Whilst bound to product, the enzyme can't bind to substrate; the
reaction slows down. This is called
product inhibition'. Eventually
equilibrium is reached; most of the enzyme is bound up with product and only a
tiny proportion of 'free' enzyme is catalysing the forward reaction, from
substrate to product. However, the
forward reaction is balanced by the 'back reaction' of product to substrate;
this occurs because there is a small chance that the enzyme will work
backwards, by 'mistake' as it were.
Now for the mechanism. The
reaction producing the desired chemical will have reached equilibrium, so the
amount of product in the cell will be constant. Now a need arises to use this product, which is promptly either
consumed by the cell itself or else shipped out of the cell to where it is
needed. The amount of product
decreases, the reaction is out of equilibrium and the forward reaction starts
to go again automatically. So the
product is replaced as fast as it is consumed.
A whole string of these reactions, a pathway, will be set up to
synthesise the product from some convenient bulk storage material. In fact there will be many pathways leading
from the one storage material to the many different products that the organism
might need. By this means the plant or
animal can go on producing any product in any quantity until the bulk storage
material runs out, which won't normally ever happen.
There is a variation of this mechanism in which the enzyme is
'switched on and off' by a 'messenger' molecule completely unrelated to the
substrate or product (rather as the enzyme that bursts open the vesicle is
switched on in the first mechanism).
This allows for quite complex control mechanisms to develop, but there
isn't space to go into them here.
Enzyme control mechanisms are crucial if the cells of a plant or
animal are going to able to respond quickly and appropriately to changing
circumstances. Each enzyme is itself a
gene product, and it is the function of the genes to produce enzymes that
provide sensitive and rapid response, in other words control; evolutionary
pressure will tend create ever faster and more complex control mechanisms. Note that all the genes can do is produce
the enzymes in the first place. Once
the system is set up, it has a life of its own, the genes are not involved in
the second to second running of it. The
genes make the machine, as best they can, and then leave the machine to run on
its own without interference. If the
machine isn't good enough, the organism isn't fit enough, it will tend to be
less successful, and the genes that were responsible will be selected
against. Conversely, good machines will
cause the genes that made them to be selected for. Plants and animals have many of these chemical control systems,
which provide rapid chemical response.
But they don't provide movement; that had to await the development of
specialised cells; muscle cells and nerve cells.
Muscle is a tissue, a collection of cells, in which each cell is
able to contract very rapidly. The bulk
of the cell is composed of many molecules of a special protein called
actinomycin. These molecules have a
remarkable property; if a particular chemical is present, they rapidly bind to
it and contract powerfully. The
molecules are carefully stacked in such a way that this contraction is
amplified, so if the chemical is released into the cell, the whole cell
contracts. The muscle tissue consists
of strings of muscle cells (muscle fibres) bundled together so that when the
trigger chemical is released, at exactly the same time, into all the cells of a
bundle of fibres, the bundle contracts, the muscle contracts and moves the
limb, digit, or whatever it is attached to the end of it. The trigger chemical is released from
special cells which are mixed in with the muscle cells; nerve cells.
In fact there are two sorts of nerve cells and the ones in muscle
tissue are called motor nerve cells.
Somewhere a long way from the muscle are the other sort, sensory nerve
cells. A long fibre projects out of the
sensory nerve cell and into the far away muscle; the axon. The existence of axons make nerve cells the
largest cell in the body. Sensory nerve
cells also have a remarkable property; they can conduct a signal from the cell
body, right down the axon and into the muscle.
This signal, a nerve pulse, is chemical, though it has an electrical
component; one can think of it as a wave of electrical particles flowing down
the axon rather like a wave can be made to flow down a long rope. The sensory nerve cell's job is to detect
external change, for example pressure.
The cell is structured so that pressure causes a chemical change within
it, leading to the release of nerve pulses along the axon. A fraction of a second after leaving the
sensor cell, the pulses arrive at the muscle and cause the motor nerve cells to
release the trigger chemical. This in
turn causes the actinomycin molecules, the cells, the fibres, and the whole
muscle to contract, so producing the required movement, which might be, say,
the contraction of a tentacle to trap some prey that had brushed past the
animal and triggered a sensory cell.
Clearly this is a very primitive sort of response, a single contraction
due to a single stimulus. It is called
a reflex, the simplest nerve-muscle interaction possible.
Muscle tissue hasn't really changed a great deal since it was
'invented' billions of years ago, but nerve tissue certainly has. It is not so much the cells themselves that
have changed, but the way they are put together; their connectivity. The simple reflex has been elaborated into
what we might call the complex reflex.
Rather than a stimulus causing an immediate and definite response, it is
as if a whole set of stimuli are 'saved up' over time and the response, if
indeed it comes at all, is nowhere near as predictable as it is for the simple
reflex. Rather than a single sensor
cell being connected directly to the motor cell, it goes through a nerve
junction, a synapse, with an intermediate motor nerve cell. This intermediate cell is not obliged to
trigger a muscle to contract straight away; it can decide not to, depending
upon what signals it is getting from other sensor cells. The cell is following a simple formula,
something like 'contract the muscle only if 3 or more sensor cells signal
within 5 seconds'. This is more
economical than the simple reflex because it avoids 'false alarms' which can
occur if a sensor cell fires spuriously or if, say, some prey is not really
close enough to capture. Such false
alarms would just waste energy, but with a group of cells firing, the animal
can give an integrated and more confident response.
The next stage is to have a set of sensor cells which connect to a
whole host of motor cells in a sort of 'junction box' called a ganglion. The ganglion is processing a much more
complex formula than the single motor cell.
It has to co-ordinate the contraction of a set of muscles based on input
from a large number of sensory cells.
The cells in the ganglion are connected in a network and although each
of them individually is doing a simple job (like the single motor cell), the
connectivity of the network is such that the sum of the ganglion's processing
is complex. Just as for the reflexes,
the connectivity of ganglia is determined genetically. Nervous systems such as these, containing
ganglia alone, are possessed by worms and insects. They are genetically programmed, their behaviour is purely
instinctive. The individual organisms
have not learned their behaviour, but the species as a whole has, via
evolution; their behaviour patterns are enshrined in the connectivity of the
ganglia.
Originating behaviour patterns via evolution is very slow and
inefficient. If a new behaviour pattern
arises, a mutation or variant of an old pattern, then the chance are it isn't a
good one. But the poor old individual
organism can't help doing what it is 'programmed' to do, so it blindly persists
with its inappropriate behaviour, possibly leading to its demise. It would be better if it could 'unlearn' the
bad behaviour and try something else.
Another problem with instinct is that it can only cope with a fixed set
of situations. Sooner or later
something is bound to crop up that the animal can't deal with. Again, the individual is bound to do something
inappropriate. It would be better if it
could stop and say 'this is a new situation, lets try something new to cope
with it'. The instinctive behaviour is
the result of the connectivity in the ganglia of the individuals; it is
hardwired. What is needed is for the
animal to be able to change some of the connectivity; for the connectivity to
not be permanent, for it to be 'soft'.
Perhaps an organism that usually behaved instinctively managed to
develop soft connections. It would
react normally to normal situations, but when faced with extraordinary ones, it
would be capable of laying down new behaviour.
The new behaviour need not be very complex; it might simply be the
decision not to respond because the situation was recognised as extraordinary. The animal will already be capable of
assessing quite complex situations, since it already does this to perform its
instinctive behaviour. What it develops
is the ability to 'spot the difference'.
It gets a large amount of data about situations, which it analyses and
then acts upon. One of these bits of
data is the clue that will enable it to distinguish the ordinary from the
extraordinary. In the past such a feat
was only accomplished by evolution via the genes; in other words if the
individual found that it was able to spot a clue which its parents couldn't, it
was only by chance mutation. Is their
any other mechanism, perhaps using 'soft' connections, by which a single
individual could acquire this ability by direct experience. Yes; by learning. But how could such a mechanism evolve?
I think that the way behaviour patterns evolve is analogous to the
way genes evolve. To recap, genes
evolve like this: An existing gene is duplicated by mutation. This isn't a problem because the extra gene
product is identical to an existing gene product. But the bogus gene mutates, a new gene product occurs; if the new
gene product is beneficial, rather than a handicap, the mutant gene is retained
as part of the organism's genotype, a new locus, a new gene. From here on the pressure of natural
selection acts upon the gene, its product and the characteristic it determines
such that the fitness conferred by the gene increases, the gene is refined.
A similar mechanism seems to work at the level of behaviour;
behaviour patterns evolve in the same way that genes do. A behaviour pattern is at first 'duplicated'
accidentally - in other words the organism performs inappropriate behaviour; it
performs behaviour intended to cope with situation X when the real situation is
situation Y. The behaviour now becomes
subject to natural selection, to evolution.
It might be immediately fatal (a lethal mutation), or decrease the
organism's fitness, or improve its reproductive success. If the 'mutation' to the new behaviour is
actually directly caused by a mutated gene, then it is a simple case of genetic
evolution of instinctive behaviour. But
could a mutation arise which permitted alternative behaviours, in a sense
letting the organism decide for themselves which one to use? If so, this would be the first step in the
evolution of learning.
There are cases of 'learning' which occur in animals that are
primarily instinctive. For example,
ants 'learn' the particular smell, a chemical marker, which identifies their
colony; bees 'learn' where a source of nectar is and communicate this
information to the hive; ducks learn to recognise their mother by a process of
'imprinting'. However these mechanisms
actually work, there must be a region of the nervous system which records a
pattern. To do this, the region must be
plastic, it must have 'soft' connections.
Either the connectivity (the pattern of axons) must change, or the cells
themselves must change, perhaps by altering the 'formula' they use to process
their inputs. In either case this will
establish a new pathway, a new link between, say, a smell and a behaviour
pattern. This plasticity must be
genetically determined, it must have arisen by mutation from a 'non-plastic'
neural system. Whatever this mutation
was, it might happen to other systems too, making them plastic, and requiring
the organism to learn the appropriate pathways which determine its behaviour.
We can use this idea, that certain neural systems might become
plastic by mutation, to suggest the steps by which learning might have
evolved. To go back to a previous
scenario, let's say an individual, call him John, needs to be able to 'spot the
clue' which tells him that a given situation should be avoided. Let's suppose there is already a link
between situation X and some behaviour, which is a response to it; call it
R. For learning to occur, John needs to
be able to set up a new link between situation Y (which superficially resembles situation X) and some avoidance
behaviour, A. If the neural system involved
is plastic, then as long as John is capable of distinguishing situations X and
Y, the new pathway, the new link, can be learned. But how might the individual learn to distinguish situations, to
recognise differences?
A fundamental feature of perception seems to be the ability to
abstract. To abstract is to pick out
the essential information from an otherwise incoherent set of sensory
impressions. For example, for crossing
the road the essential information we require is the speed, distance and direction
of the cars on the road; we are not interested in the colour of the car or the
number of passenger in it. We
'abstract' the speed and distance data and use it to help us cross the road. The point is that there is actually a great
deal of information, of sense data available in any situation, so an organism
has to 'zero in' on just a few features of the scene which are the important
ones; in other words they are the clues which it uses to determine what's going
on. All organisms with sensory organs
have to learn which clues to use. For
instinctive organisms, genetic evolution has done this learning for them; a
process of trial and error; individuals which were programmed to pick out the
wrong clues failed to survive. Animals
capable of learning use a different method, which I shall explain before
returning to John's predicament.
Let's say another individual, Kevin, has learned a particular
response, P, to a given situation. In
all situations, he records all the sense data coming in, and in some situations
he does P. Sometimes when Kevin does P,
it turns out to have been the wrong thing to do - the behaviour is not
rewarded. Because he has recorded all
the data from all recent situations, Kevin can compare all the situations in
which P worked to those in which P didn't, and spot the difference. This is exactly like the puzzle in which one
has to spot, say, ten differences between two almost identical drawings. One way to 'cheat' would be to rig up a
system of mirrors so that one could rapidly replace a view of one drawing by
the other. Then the differences would
'leap out' at you; they would be like ten winking lights, or ten waving hands
scattered over the drawing and therefore easily located. Kevin, the individual in our thought
experiment is able to perform a similar trick.
By going over the recordings of the two kinds of situation ('P works'
and 'P fails'), he is able to detect a pattern, a consistent difference between
the two situations, in other words a clue, C,
which he can use to distinguish between them. When C is present, P doesn't work. Once having spotted this clue, Kevin changes his behaviour and no
longer performs response P if clue C is present. This new behaviour pattern works until some new situation occurs
in which C is absent, but P still doesn't work; then Kevin has to look for
another clue, D.
This is one possible way in which the ability to spot clues, which
all organisms with sensory apparatus have, can be adapted in order to enable
animals to distinguish situations. In
the previous example, John, who is trying to distinguish situation X from
situation Y, could do so using this 'spot the difference' method, by
recognising the pattern. Once having
learned the difference between X and Y, he 'tries out' the new behaviour A
rather than R when situation Y occurs.
As long as A is successful, the link from Y to A is strengthened, the
plastic nerve cells are more firmly moulded into their new configuration.
It is the presence of pattern in nature, and of pattern recognition
in animals which is fundamental to the process of learning. The patterns of Nature are being 'imprinted'
on the brains of animals, being translated into neural patterns, being turned
into memes. The reason this happens is
simply that the more sense the world makes to an organism, the more appropriate
will its behaviour be; it will be fitter.
It is the ability to recognise pattern, and to form intricately detailed
models of reality in their brains that humans possess above all other
creatures.
Why did I say that the development of the mind was the most
important evolutionary leap since the perfection of the genetic system
itself? Because it was in fact the
perfection of a completely new genetic system.
The new system is not based upon DNA but on neural circuits, patterns of
connectivity in animal brains. In the
human brain, we call these patterns 'ideas' (when we recognise them at
all). This is somewhat imprecise, but a
term has been coined which synthesises the notion of a gene and an idea: the
word is MEME. The new genetics is more
properly called MEMETICS.
The evolution of the memetic mechanism is the evolution of the
mind. Just as evolution created genes,
it has created memes; so the approach to take to find out more about memes is
to use the analogy of the gene. For
each element in the genetic model, is there a corresponding element in the
memetic model?
The fundamental difference between the
genetic and memetic systems is not that they employ different storage devices
(genes use DNA, memes use neural circuits) but that memes evolve millions of
times faster than genes. Memes will
leave genes behind. The mind is, in a
very real sense, superior to the body.
If memes are real entities, why have they not been discovered
before? If they are evolving, why isn't
this evolution obvious? If memes are
genuine units of inheritance, why has this not been noted before? There isn't a simple answer. Perhaps the time is right, we're ready for
them now; but this has a somewhat mystical ring to it. Another way to put it is that the meme for
memetics has only just evolved! Some
light can be thrown on this issue by examining the way in which genes and
evolution were themselves discovered.
Darwin lay the foundations for evolution, and Mendel those for
genetics. But neither was aware of the
other's work. The two theories were
only brought together at the turn of the century. Mendel's work was ignored for years, and Darwin was openly
ridiculed and attacked for his beliefs.
It has taken decades for the theory of genetic evolution to be accepted
as by science as the orthodox view.
Among laymen, it is still somewhat suspect, particularly since it seems
to hit at the root of one of our ancient beliefs; that Man was put on the Earth
by a Divine Creator, God.
The genius of both Darwin and Mendel was not to perform startling
new experiments or to discover marvellous phenomena. It was simply to take a 'fresh look' at some everyday
occurrences, the distribution of types of finch, the way attributes of peas are
passed on; and to ask themselves 'how might this have happened?'; and then to
come up with a rational and defensible theory that explained their
observations. They had to take a fresh
look, not accept traditional explanations.
Newton had the same gift when he asked 'why should objects fall down and
not up; why do they fall at all?' So things can be simply staring us in the
face, but we can't see them. We take
things for granted, make huge assumptions, have massive blind spots; all very
human traits. In some respects they are
an asset since they enable us to ignore a lot of otherwise confusing and
conflicting information; rather than try to unravel the Gordian Knot, we just
cut clean through it. This is just pragmatism,
expediency, the end justifying the means; sound political doctrines all, but
scientifically and philosophically they are anathema. They do not aid understanding; they circumvent it.
Evidence for the existence of memes has been around for centuries,
waiting for someone to unravel it, to put the pieces together, and to express
the emerging picture in a cogent and lucid way. It seems to me that until the development of the parallel theory
of genes, there was no vocabulary to adequately express the concepts
involved. But with genes as an analogy,
the meme emerged from the background, as it were. Here I want to ask the question 'how much like genetic evolution
is memetic evolution?' The answer is 'fundamentally the same' - but will it
again take a hundred years for this to become the orthodox view?
What is the evidence for memes?
What are memes? Since I am using
genes as the analogy, I will first ask 'What are genes?'
The gene is the unit of inheritance. For this reason it is also the unit of selection, of natural
selection. Mendel's great insight was
to see clearly that characteristics are inherited in discrete units which do
not overlap or merge. If a man with
brown eyes marries a woman with blue eyes, their children do not have muddy blue
eyes; they are either blue or brown.
Unfortunately few characteristics have this very simple nature. This is simply because most characters are
determined by two or more genes so the patterns of inheritance are more
complex. Also there are several alleles
in the population for each gene (for instance there are grey and green eyes
too), which confuses the issue.
Finally, the environment has a role to play in the expression of many
characteristics, which must be taken into account. Mendel must have had to search for some time to find his simple
one gene characters, but once he had them, the genetic theory was the only one
which explained them, and also a lot of other known facts about
inheritance. It was an act of faith on
his part to cling to his theory and try to explain the apparent contradictions
in terms of it.
There is an argument that currently rages about the idea of genes
being the unit of selection. Is it the
gene or the organism that is selected?
I think it is the gene; but I can see where the confusion arises, and
this is in the failure to precisely define what selection means. To explain this I must first introduce a
technical term. A length of DNA that codes
for a single polypeptide chain is called a cistron. It is common to refer to a cistron as a gene, but this leads to
confusion (as we shall see) because the definition of a cistron is a
biochemical definition, and the definition of a gene is a genetic one.
What natural selection does is to answer this question 'how many
grandchildren shall I give this individual?' It is not enough to produce a lot
of progeny; they must themselves go on to produce their own. If they have some fatal flaw (perhaps they
are all slow runners) then no matter how many children there are, they will get
a thumbs down from natural selection.
Nature decides between individuals by pitting them against each other in
competition, the winners being the 'fitter' ones who get the payoff measured in
grandchildren. So although the
individual is tested, it is the grandchildren that get the prize, namely their
own existence. For any selection
mechanism to work at all there must be continuity, something must persist
throughout the process, some configuration must remain stable, or there would
be nothing to select. The configuration
of the tested individual is obviously not the same as the progeny and
grand-progeny; so what is it that is the same?
A first guess might be the chromosome, since the individual has
donated half his chromosomes to each the progeny and thus one quarter of them
to each of the grand-progeny. However,
just before producing the gametes (which have only one copy of each chromosome
rather than pairs of them), the chromosome pairs exchange material, a process
called crossing over. This is a random
swapping of long sections of DNA, whole groups of alleles are exchanged. So the configuration of the chromosome that
is passed on is quite unlike the one that the parent has. What is the same is the configuration of the
pieces of chromosome that are exchanged; in other words clusters of
cistrons. It is therefore these cistron
clusters that are the units of selection, the genes. It is an important point that genes are not necessarily single
cistrons, but cistron clusters. This is
because many cistrons work in teams which are located immediately adjacent to
one another along the chromosome. Their
proximity improves their chances of being selected together because they are
less likely to be split up during crossing over than they would be if they were
widely spaced. If the team of cistrons
is broken up, or rather if some members of the team are replaced by their
alleles, the benefit they imparted will be destroyed. A gene is only recognised by virtue of the benefit it gives to
the individual, so if that benefit is realised by a team of cistrons, then the
whole team must be considered a gene.
Thus the genetic mechanism selects not just for individual cistrons (one
protein) but for teams of cistrons that work together (groups of proteins).
It is these genes, clusters of one or more cistrons, that persist,
they live forever. Lines in which the
genes are destroyed (by mutation of a single cistron or by crossing over in a
team) do not inherit the benefit and die out; selection favours the given
configuration. If there was only one
line, of course, the gene would not live forever. But life would never have got off the ground at all if it had not
overcome this problem virtually on day one.
The strategy is to make as many copies of a configuration as possible,
so that if any are destroyed there are still plenty around. A similar strategy is used at a higher level
by certain fish and insects; they have millions of progeny, nearly all of which
are eaten by predators but a few survive.
The computing industry uses the same strategy too; important information
is copied (it is called backing-up) regularly and repeatedly to ensure that it
will not be lost if the working copy is damaged. The strategy of replication is really the most basic of all strategies
for survival. Individual copies are
doomed to be destroyed; the problem of aging.
Rather than try to evolve immortality for individual organisms, nature
has sidestepped the issue, taken a simpler course; just keep making copies of
them.
This is actually a fundamental point; why has natural selection
favoured the evolution of replicating organisms rather than immortal ones? I don't know the answer but there are two
reasons I can suggest. One is that
organic immortality (as opposed to genetic immortality) is just very difficult
to achieve; the second law of thermodynamics is too implacable and fierce an
opponent; entropy, chance, fate will sooner or later destroy a single
individual organism. Even if animals
were biologically immortal, what's to stop them being eaten, becoming fatally
ill, or just having a fatal accident?
The second reason is this: if the two systems, immortals and mortals,
lived side by side, the mortal one would eventually become fitter, it would
evolve. Evolution can only occur if the
genes are reshuffled between generations and mutation is allowed; immortals
would not evolve, they would stagnate.
Even if such systems have evolved in the past, they would be no match
for the fitter mortals, and would eventually die out. It provokes the question: in which of the two systems are there
really immortals?
Genes, then, are long-lived configurations. They have adopted extremely elaborate means
to ensure their survival. They have
built for themselves a machine which not only keeps making copies of the genes
but, by evolution, keeps getting better at it.
In fact it was evolution which created the machine for the genes in the
first place. The machine is composed of
a number of elements called 'organisms'.
There are many types of organism and many copies of each type. Different types of organism have different
roles to play in the global ecological machine. The machine is 'immortal' in spite of the fact that its elements
wear out, because they always replace themselves. The elements, organisms, get better at their various roles, and
even create new roles (new species).
The genes, though, hardly change at all. Many of them have been around for millions, or even billions of
years. Now and then new genes arise and
try their hand, but more often than not they fail; very occasionally one of
them is successful and joins the elite club of the immortals. If it remains in the 'pool', it will
gradually be 'perfected', all its wrinkles will be ironed out. The nearer it gets to 'perfection', the less
likely it is to change, the more stable will that configuration be. The very ancient genes are the ones that
have, in a sense, achieved perfection.
Incidentally, the way I have summarised the role of genes might
suggest to you that I think of genes as somehow 'conscious', that they are
purposeful agents, that they 'desire' immortality. Far from it. Such an
attitude is simply anthropomorphic; an attempt to explain the behaviour of a
thing or system in the same terms in which we explain our own behaviour. Genes no more 'desire' immortality than
objects 'desire' to be nearer to the centre of the Earth. I have used terms like strategy, success,
and immortality as metaphors. It is not
that genes want to survive and replicate; they just do. They are as much at the mercy of the blind
forces of nature as water is as it tries to get to the sea, bursting dams and
flooding rivers along the way. In a
sense they do what they do by accident, or rather, as we have seen, by a series
of cumulative accidents. During each of
these accidents, the genes, or their primitive ancestors, were not 'trying' to
survive; they just did, by a one in a million chance. But as time went on, as we have seen, they became better and
better at it. Genes, evolution, nature
is not purposeful; it is blind.
Back to memes for a moment.
By analogy with genes, memes are also units of inheritance and of
selection; the difference between them lies in what it is that is
inherited. What is the function of the
gene and the meme, how are they expressed?
Biochemically, a gene is a length of DNA, one or more
cistrons. It expresses itself by
producing a protein or a team of proteins.
(Some genes code for RNA sequences too, but I will leave that aside
here.) The gene products act mainly during the development of the embryo, and a
smaller number act on behalf of the adult organism. One could summarise the gene function as 'to construct and
maintain the organism'. Now we've
constructed our organism; what does it do?
How does it behave? Is it not
the case that genes have another function, namely to determine the behaviour of
the individual? Yes and no.
We have already seen in the section on behaviour that genes
determine the behaviour of organisms by building chemical systems, controlled
by enzymes (gene products), which can respond to external events. In animals, they also build muscles and a
nervous system to control them; this enables animals to respond by movement, by
directly manipulating their bodies and their environment. Throughout evolution, the complexity of the
nervous system increased until a new organ, the brain, was developed. The brain is not completely hardwired as are
more primitive nervous systems. Some of
the brain is 'softwired' or plastic, designed to record data, process it, and
learn from it. The animal is learning
to recognise patterns and regularities which it uses to select from its
repertoire of behaviours. Learning
involves building up a large library of patterns, and creating a system of
rules and hypotheses, a model, which links the patterns with the most
appropriate behaviour for the individual.
So do genes determine behaviour?
Why have I answered 'Yes and no'?
Yes: in that, in primitive organisms, behaviour is hardwired into their
nervous systems (and chemical systems); they are 'genetically programmed' from
birth. No: in that, in advanced
organisms with brains, much of their behaviour is learned, acquired by experience,
by interacting with the environment; the genes have handed over control. It is not the same as the genes constructing
a machine and then letting it run on its own, without interference. The behaviour of all organisms is controlled
in this way, whether the machine is purely chemical (plants), a nervous system
(primitive animals) or a brain. The
point is that although the genes lay down the goals of behaviour (survival and
reproduction), the exact details are left up to the individual; as long as it achieves
the goals, it can do what it likes, how it does it is no concern of the genes.
For many animals with brains, the list of goals is rather long,
and the list of 'freedoms' very short; their behaviour is primarily
instinctive. But as we progress up
through the species, through mammals, primates and apes to humans, the degree
of freedom increases. The list of goals
becomes more like a prescribed 'life-style' than a strict set of rules. Within the framework of this life-style,
which defines the ecological niche in which the organism lives, the individual
is free to deal with situations as they arise in whatever manner it deems
appropriate. However, even with this
relatively high degree of freedom, which we can call intelligence, most individuals
adopt a set of behaviours that is common to their species. It is only when we get to humans that the
freedom and intelligence comes into its own, and that individuals are able to
adapt to a great range of possible life-styles.
Something new has happened, something quite amazing and with
staggering implications. In the distant
past, behaviour was entirely instinctive, absolutely determined by the
genes. New behaviour could only arise
through the evolution of new genes. The
genes had to learn the hard way: by sacrificing individuals, failed
experiments; by producing a variety of individuals with different behaviours
and selecting the 'fittest' ones; by slowly adapting the organisms over tens or
hundreds of generations; in other words by genetic evolution. But in the recent past a new mechanism
emerged. The genes handed over control
(partial control at first) to the brain and it was up to the brain to do the
learning. The individual could adapt
its own behaviour in its own lifetime!
Because the brain was 'softwired', it was easier for the brain to do the
learning, rather than evolution; if it learned some 'bad' behaviour, it could
just unlearn it! And individuals could
do a lot of their learning in safe environment, the family group protected by
their parents, a sort of 'life simulation'.
Rather than new behaviour arising by genetic evolution, the individual
was able to evolve its own behaviour.
And there is the clue: 'evolve its own behaviour'. The process by which individuals learn is a
process of evolution.
As I have already suggested, evolution is a universal
phenomena. It is the only process by
which complex systems can develop, by which order is created out of chaos. Its four cornerstones are stability,
propagation, variation and competition.
The material upon which evolution acts is not relevant to the
fundamental process; all that is required is that different configurations can
arise. The second law, entropy, will
ensure that only the most stable configurations persist (survive) which
provides a selection mechanism. For the
evolution of life, the system being acted on was the geological-meteorological
system which comprises the surface of the Earth, the material acted on was
water based chemistry, and the configurations that emerged were genes. For the evolution of mind, the system being
acted on is the behaviour of an individual organism, the material acted on is
the individual's brain, and the configurations that emerge are memes.
One way to look at genes and memes is this: genes determine what an
organism is, and memes determine what an organism does. The function of genes is to construct and
maintain the body of an individual; the function of memes is to control its
behaviour. Memes existed before the
evolution of brains; they were constructed by the genes and consisted in the
chemical systems and the nervous systems that comprised the primitive
organism's response mechanisms. So
early memes were absolutely determined by genes. One could say that the meme was a 'higher level' aspect of a particular
set of genes, and so memes would have been inherited with a given set of
genes. With the development of brains
and of learning, though, a narrow gap developed between genes and memes. Memes were no longer absolutely determined
by genes; they were partly determined by the environment, by experience.
Acting against the widening of this gap was the great advantage
which instinct conferred upon offspring - they inherit their behaviour, so they
don't waste any time 're-inventing the wheel'.
However, the genes found a way to bridge the gap, allowing it to become
steadily wider; they devised a means by which the new memes could be
inherited.
A new mechanism evolved by which parents could hand on the
non-genetic component of the meme. This
mechanism is what we now call education.
The parents teach the children; the children learn by imitation. The gap between genes and memes grew wider
as the memetic mechanism evolved (genetically), until by the time humans
emerged, it was a yawning chasm, now spanned by a very high-tech 'genetic
bridge' fulfilling the function of education.
Nearly all our behaviour is acquired by learning, and we have to spend
many years being taught by our parents (or their agents) before we can look
after ourselves. The genes still give
us our basic goals, our instincts for food, comfort, sex and stimulation. The exact manner in which each individual
obtains these things is not prescribed, though; we are free to live our own
lives, free to choose what we want to do.
Now I can more clearly answer the question: What is a meme? It is the unit of storage which controls
behaviour. It has three components,
each derived from one of three sources: genes, education, and the physical
world. For fixed 'instinctive'
behaviour (plants, insects, etc.) each meme is absolutely determined by a set
of genes. For learned behaviour
(animals with advanced brains) each meme is determined partly by genes, and
partly by the environment. Memes are
transmitted from parent to child via education. In humans, memes are largely independent of the genes; all our
behaviour is learned. What is the
memetic material, analogous to the genetic material DNA? In general it is that system, chemical or
nervous, which controls an organism's behaviour. In particular, for humans, it is the brain.
Individual memes are individual configurations of nerve cells;
'neural circuits'. Just as a gene can
be both a cistron or a cluster of cistrons, so a meme can be both one circuit
or a cluster of circuits. Memes work in
teams. The teams might form into a
super-team, which would still be a meme; the super-teams might form a
hyper-team, and so on. Any coherent set
of memes which worked together at any level can itself legitimately be called a
meme. It is the sum total of the
operations of all the memes working together that determines the animal's
behaviour. This 'sum total' of memes is
the individual's model of the world and the memes are the elements of the
model.
To us humans, able to look inside our heads, as it were, the memes
appear to us as 'ideas', 'notions', 'concepts' 'propositions' or
'hypotheses'. Many of our memes are
unconscious, they are more like feelings, fears, interests, inclinations and so
on. They are unconscious because we
acquired them 'unconsciously', either when we were very young, or via a
mechanism laid down when we were very young.
An example of an unconscious idea we might acquire in adult life is that
we don't like a certain individual, but we would be hard pressed to say what it
was about them that we didn't like.
Each of us acquires a shared set of memes, so we share a general world
view. But just as an individual's
genotype is unique, one's memotype is also unique. We each have our own way of seeing things, our own way of doing
things, our own personality. Memes are
not acquired once and for all at birth, as genes are; they are acquired
constantly throughout life. Those that
are acquired early on are the most tenacious ones; many of the memes that
present themselves later are rejected because they don't 'fit' with the
established pattern. New memes are
vetted by a special mechanism akin to our immunity system. The rejected memes are not 'destroyed', but
simply turned off, like genes are turned off; we have these memes but we don't
express them, we don't include them in our Model. This is exactly like having an idea and either believing it
(incorporating it into your model) or not believing it. If we believe an idea, it affects our
behaviour.
How might such a complex system of memes based on neural circuits
have evolved? I think the basic meme is
probably the simple reflex, a single circuit of cells going directly from
stimulus to response. In English one
might express this meme as 'if this cell is triggered, contract this muscle.'
As the cells began to connect in different networks, so the number of memes
grew, each meme being an alternative pathway through the network. The pathways that were reinforced (by learning)
became the accepted memes. In very complex
networks such as our brains, where the memes formed up into teams and
super-teams, the memes became more complex, though still of the form 'if this
is the situation, this is what you do.' The exact neurophysiology of the brain
is not all that important to my argument.
Brains are built to a genetic blueprint, they can only process
information in the way they have been 'designed' to do by the genes. But they are designed to promote our
survival, which means they must be able to make rapid and accurate assessments
of a situation and to elicit appropriate behaviour. This must surely mean that our brains are designed to model
reality as closely as possible. It is
difficult to see how it would be to our advantage to be mistaken about reality,
to be further from it rather than closer to it. Genes (or memes) which fostered illusions might provide a short
term solution to a problem, but in the long run they will be selected out when
a better gene (or meme), one that is closer to reality, is hit upon. So we can be sure that our brains and minds
are reliable windows on the world.
This means that, by and large, the memes we possess that are
switched on are 'true'. They work. This is especially true of the early memes
we acquired from our parents during our early 'conditioning'. If these memes didn't work, our behaviour
would be too bizarre for us to survive, and that of our forebears would also
have been bizarre and they would never have produced us. Having said that, there are many memes, many
ideas, which are not true. We know this
simply because many people have conflicting ideas; they can't all be
right. But these memes are peripheral
ones, not the mainstream. Just as 99%
of our individual genotypes are shared with all other humans, so the majority
of our memes are also shared (but maybe less than 99%).
It is quite some time ago that I left off talking about the human
condition and the growth of the child.
Before I return to those ideas, armed now with a theory of memes, I want
to quickly summarise the theory.
Evolution is a sort of mathematical process, somewhat akin to
entropy but working in the opposite direction.
The second law implies that entropy, disorder, will always increase, but
evolution implies that out of that chaos, a small region of order will
grow. The cornerstones of evolution are
stability, propagation, variation and competition. Conditions on Earth were such that evolution rapidly developed
the carbon chemistry of the primeval sea into living systems. Ultimately, a single system emerged, one
based upon DNA as the genetic material and protein based organisms which
constituted a global machine. The
machine perpetuated the DNA, and at the same time improved itself and the rate
at which it evolved. Organisms
developed movement, nervous systems, brains and behaviour. The first behaviour was instinctive and
determined by genes. But the rigid,
instinctive strategies were surpassed by the evolution of learned
strategies. Organisms became able to
develop their own strategies to cope with new situations as they arose and at
the time. The brain became the
receptacle for memes, ideas or hypotheses about reality stored as neural
circuits or pathways in the brain. The
complete set of memes constitutes a model which the individual employs to
assess a given situation and tell it what to do.
It is the memes which form the Model of Reality that each of us
has. Memes evolve not only in
'evolutionary' time, but also in each of our lifetimes. We refer to the rapid, personal evolution of
our memes as 'learning'. On day one we
have no memes at all apart from a few reflexes that keep us going (provided our
mother does not abandon us) until we can sort it all out. Gradually new memes evolve from these simple
reflexes, millions of times faster than genes do, but by exactly the same
process that genes do. Thus, a copy of
the reflex is made and comes under 'natural selection'. For memes, though, the agent of selection is
not so much Nature as ourselves - we pick the best memes, the best ideas,
according to how useful they are to us, whether they work. We are able to mutate the memes to produce
new 'alleles', new versions of the same idea, and also completely new
ideas. All these ideas compete for our
attention and approval, to be selected (believed) and included in our Model,
the way we see things. The tool we use
to produce mutation is known as creativity.
The tool we use to select 'good' ideas, fitter memes, is the scientific
method, trial and error. We try out a
set of beliefs (model) or a single belief (meme), and see if it works; if it
doesn't it is 'switched off', rejected.
Eventually we get better at 'second guessing' whether a given idea will
work or not, we develop a knack, an ear for the 'ring of truth':
Intuition. This acts as a sort of
immunity mechanism, rejecting bad ideas which might make us do stupid things,
vetting all meme candidates for suitability.
It does this by giving them a 'dry run', by setting up a proposed model
and 'listening' to the sound of the new model - does it sound sweet or
not? All this is done unconsciously, so
that at a conscious level all we have is a sense of 'rightness' ('Yes, of
course; that's it!') or wrongness ('Something here seems a bit fishy to me!').
Evolution is working on memes at more than one level. At one level, memes evolve as they are
passed on from one generation to another.
They change slowly, but not as slowly as genes do because, unlike genes,
new memes can also arise within a single generation by evolution acting at
another level. It is at this other
level that our own personal memes evolve, within our lifetimes, starting from
nothing and gradually building up into our Model. Memes evolved in this way, can be inherited from the parents or
acquired by 'experiment' from the environment.
This second way of acquiring memes explains why inherited memes evolve
more quickly than do genes. It is a
special feature of memes that they can be acquired from the environment, and it
does not apply to genes; genetic characteristics cannot be acquired, they can
only be inherited. It was an early
fallacy, attributed to Lamarck, that such acquisition was possible, but we now
know that genes only change randomly, by mutation. Incidentally, there is a third level of evolution, cultural
evolution, which I shall discuss presently.
The brain is so structured that it facilitates the evolution and
expression of memes (which is its primary function), just as the genetic
mechanism (DNA, RNA, ribosomes) is structured to express genes. The details of the physiology of the brain
aren't as important as the principles by which the mind works, and some insight
into these is to be achieved by pursuing the analogy between genes and
memes. Genes work by creating gene
products, enzymes, which catalyse chemical reactions within the cell, raising
and lowering the amounts of a number of key chemical substances. Perhaps there is a meme product which
catalyses 'neurological reactions'?
Whatever may be the details of how they work, memes do not bring about
chemical change; they bring about movement, action and behaviour.
We can study the brain from outside in (behaviourism), or from
inside out (psychology). Both
approaches are equally valid; different ways of looking at the same thing. Rather than take sides, I will attempt to
synthesise the two approaches by discussing a phenomenon common to them both -
Language. From the behaviourist's
viewpoint, we exhibit 'linguistic behaviour', our utterances are 'speech
acts'. A psychologist, on the other
hand, tries to elucidate the 'conceptual thinking' that underlies our use of
words. The unifying concept is that
language is simply the outward expression of our memes. One meme, one proposition.
Language developed as an efficient way to transmit memes from one
human to another, particularly from parent to child.
Only humans have the necessary vocal equipment to produce
words. We must have developed language
before we reached our current form, since a number of physical characteristics
have evolved to facilitate it. Before
spoken language, memes were transmitted by example; the offspring imitated the
parents and the parents educated the offspring non-verbally. The mechanics of meme transmission is quite
unlike that of gene transmission, but the effect is the same; the progeny
acquire characteristics from the parents.
No material is transmitted directly, though; the memes still evolve by
themselves, but one of the criteria that the child uses to select memes is the
approval a meme generates in its parents.
It is just simple conditioning; the parents reinforce the behaviour
'coded for' by the memes, so the behaviour and the memes generating it are
retained. The same mechanism of
'imitation' operates in human infants today up until the day they have mastered
language; indeed, it continues to operate, in the background, whilst the
individual is occupied processing verbal information. The fact that a dual system, verbal and non-verbal, is in
operation accounts for the curious behaviour that sometimes afflicts people who
have been given 'hypocritical' instruction from their parents. The parents tell them verbally to do one
thing, but non-verbally to do the opposite (they say one thing and do
another). The child tries to
incorporate two conflicting memes, which is only possible by inventing another
spurious meme (something like 'its okay to be hypocritical'), or by 'kidding
oneself'. Sometimes this can have
pathological results.
Incidentally, the term 'meme' derives from the traditional,
pre-language method of meme transmission, from the Greek for 'imitation'.
Language is acquired by imitation too. It is composed of memes for its sounds, its semantics and its
syntax; all of which have to created by the child almost out of nothing. The basis of language, of what the child is
able to say and to understand in it, is the wordless model of the world which
it has already developed in its first 3 years.
The Model is composed of memes, concepts, which the child is able to tag
with the new 'handles' it has learned, namely words. This means that, insofar as we can avoid hypocrisy and
self-deception, any statements we make which we hold to be 'true' are actually
elements of the Model - memes laid bare.
Its not that easy to be sure we are being completely honest with
others, or even with ourselves. But if
we cannot guarantee 'truth' or even 'true belief', we can at least strive for
consistency and accuracy: Do these beliefs, this set of memes, 'hang
together'? Does this person's behaviour
support what he purports to believe in?
This essay is, in effect, a verbal exposition of a large part of my own
Model of Reality, that part which is conscious to me. Although it is purely theoretical, its memes are derived from several
sources: experience (the world), reading (other peoples memes) and inspiration
(creativity). I have two motives in
verbalising my model: I can bring it under better scrutiny, both my own and
others; and I am affirming my own belief in it by 'sticking my neck out', as it
were.
Language, then, is a set of sounds, which are tags we use in place
of our old mental images to represent our memes. We need the sounds to exchange our memes with other people. A lot of our discourse is still on the level
of 'body language' (which is just as well for pre-language infants!), though it
is largely unconscious. But sounds,
articulated by the mouth and modulated by the larynx, are a better way of
encoding memes. You don't have to be
watching the speaker to get the message, for instance; and our vocal repertoire
is practically limitless, so there is scope to represent any and all memes, all
shades of meaning with great accuracy.
This is a dramatic improvement over body language, with its sparse
vocabulary of memes showing only interest, disapproval, fear, excitement,
withdrawal, and so on. It is as if we
have replaced a simple club with an armoury of sophisticated weapons and
precision tools.
There is a clear parallel between the invention of language, and a
genetic phenomenon with which we are all too familiar - viruses. A virus is a kind of organism that has
dispensed with the encumbrance of a body, or even of a cell. It retains only the DNA itself, carefully
wrapped in a simple protein coat. It doesn't
even posses the ability to reproduce itself, let alone feed, respire,
photosynthesise, or indeed any of the abilities normally shown by
organisms. How then does it procreate? It is a parasite. It invades a living cell and takes it over, hi-jacks the genetic
mechanism itself, and instructs the cell to make millions of copies of the
virus itself! The cell is crippled by
this, needless to say, and is no longer any use to the organism possessing it. Worse, it is a time bomb. When the virus has used up all the cells
productive capability, so that it has become a huge vesicle packed with new
virus particles, it bursts the cell open, infecting all the cells in the
vicinity with a virus in like manner.
A virus could not have existed before the genetic mechanism itself
had evolved. In fact, the virus must be
derived from that self same mechanism, just as all other life on Earth is. There is evidence that viruses originated
from a particular kind of gene, a stretch of DNA called a plasmid. Although the vast majority of DNA is in the
nucleus of the cell, some can be found in the rest of the cell too, in the
cytoplasm. These strands of DNA are
called plasmids. They seem to be able
to insert themselves into the chromosomal DNA, and to remove themselves again. What they are for, what their function is,
is unknown. But it could be that once
upon a time a 'mutant' plasmid evolved which inserted itself into a chromosome
and instructed the genetic control system to make copies of it. The copies could have then infected other
cells when the first cell died. The
coat protein might have been a later refinement. But the plasmid would have 'escaped' from the control of the
cell, it would be a free living agent itself - a virus.
Memes have worked the same trick.
Language evolved, in genetic and memetic terms, because it increased the
accuracy, precision, and speed of memetic transmission. The primitive humans who first used language
became fitter than their non-language-using cousins. Once 'out in the open' the speed with which new memes evolved
increased dramatically, a new phenomenon had been created - cultural
evolution. Before the development of
language, a single meme, once created in the mind of an individual, had only
one chance to replicate itself - when the animal became a parent and educated
its offspring. But with language, a new
meme could be spread throughout a population very quickly. This meant that the number of possible
trials of the meme in a given space of time was increased many times. If the meme was a 'good' one, it would pass
the trials and within days rather than millennia it would become established in
the 'meme pool'. If, on the other hand,
it was a bad idea, a disadvantage to individuals possessing it, then its life
would be mercifully short. The
development of writing, and later of printing and publishing means that the
length of time in which memes are distributed throughout a population is
virtually instantaneous. Information
Technology and the media now means that the cross section of the population
available to be infected is measured in millions.
Cultural memes, like viruses, have a life of their own. Their success consists their popularity, in
the number of people for whom that meme is 'switched on' - the number of
believers. A successful meme is not
necessarily a 'good' meme in the long term, though it may well become
'fashionable' for a while. Many memes
are useless but benign, some are indispensable, and some are malignant - the
parasites. Parasitic memes are the
parallel of virus bourn diseases; they cause epidemics, suffering and
death. They offer short term solutions,
palliatives, or pain relief, which is how they get past the normal meme defence
mechanism, but in the long term they are only interested in themselves and they
create havoc in the world models of the victims, and therefore in their
behaviour. The only cure is for the
victims to somehow arm their defence mechanism with more powerful weapons, for
them to get a better grip on reality, for them to grow.
The defence mechanism against foreign memes, the immunity system
of the mind, is the faculty of Intuition.
This is a sub-system, a sub-model of the main Model, which has developed
an 'ear' for the smoothness of the running of the Model. It vets all foreign memes, as well as the
home grown variety, such that they are only admitted if they make the Model
sound sweeter, not less sweet.
Dangerous, unrealistic memes are thus barred from expression, banished
to a pool of useless memes. Perhaps the
meme is given a positive rejection, in which case its negation, its anti-meme,
is incorporated into the Model! In a
sense Intuition is weighing up the 'truth' of the meme, how close it is to
Reality.
The Intuition is only as good as the Model of which it forms a
part. If the Model is already a long
way from Reality, or if the Intuition is itself badly trained (a sort of 'tone
deafness'), then any old meme will get past the door. If this goes on for some time, the individual's Model will
correspond less and less with the real world, and so more and more bad memes
will be accepted; its a vicious circle.
The extent to which the behaviour of these people is abnormal, and their
lives unsuccessful, depends largely upon which particular cocktail of memes
they have acquired. They may not
consider themselves to be at all affected, or they may be very disturbed. There is a wide variety of strategies that
such people adopt to deal with their peculiar distance from Reality, and they
are often put in one of a few dozen special categories as a result: tyrant,
sadist, psychopath, fascist, bigot, misanthrope, pessimist, fatalist,
depressive, schizophrenic, defeatist, loser, coward, and so on. Whether they can be helped, whether they
want help, depends upon the exact circumstances. But the general way in which there interests might be served is
to help them to grow: disabuse them of their malicious memes and give them some
healthy ones.
So language, culture, the world of ideas, philosophy and science
are all aspects of a single phenomenon - a pool of viral memes that populates
our brains and our libraries. To study
this creation is to study ourselves.
Science is not so much a body of 'knowledge' as a collection of theories
which humans can use to model the world.
Language is a sort of gateway into our minds, into the world of
memes. The words we use are not
arbitrarily selected tokens, but meaningful representations of our memes. This is why we often find that a particular
word or phrase is extremely apt to describe the concept it refers to, why we
are often amused by such aptness and by ambiguity and word-play, and why
certain forms of poetry are possible at all.
The way a language changes reflects the way the memes are
evolving. Such evolution occurs by
copying and mutation. This is why the
use of analogy is so powerful; we only understand new concepts by referring
back to established ones. We use phrases
such as 'it is as if...' Analogy and
metaphor are the main tools we use to comprehend Reality - we are copying
memes. As our understanding grows, the
analogy is qualified and modified: 'it is as if...but...' This maintains our categories and characterises
them - we are mutating our memes. Our
experience is structured in a hierarchy, a taxonomy, which parallels the levels
of organisation of our memes (into teams, super-teams, hyper-teams, and so
on). The structure of our language
reflects this: there are genera, ways in which the items of a class are the
same; and differentia, ways in which the items of a single class differ. The differentia of one level are the genera
of the next level down. So by studying
Language itself, quite apart from using it to communicate, we are studying the
way we structure Reality, studying our own Models of Reality.
The framework I have attempted to elucidate here, that ideas are
memes, biological entities which behave exactly like genes, permits a fresh
analysis of language and philosophy in which words and propositions are tied
into a 'central dogma'. Just as genes
are the units of inheritance, selfishly ensuring their own perpetuation - their
immortality - so memes are also a unit of inheritance with identical
aspirations. They are the determinants
of behaviour, and they selfishly ensure their own immortality. The old philosophers asked 'What is the good
life?', the central question of their philosophy. This question is actually the cry of the memes themselves. In translation it reads 'How can I [the
meme] live forever?' In biological
terms it means this: What meme or set of memes is it that leads to a stable
society? If this doesn't seem to
follow, consider this: the meme is the determinant of behaviour, and 'the good
life' is a way of life, a set of behaviour patterns (determined by memes) which
everyone ought to adopt. The definition
of perpetuation is stability. So if
memes are to perpetuate themselves, the behaviour they determine, which they
hope everyone will adopt, must be that which leads to a stable society, to
social harmony, to social health. I
stress society, because it is fundamental to the human condition; it is our
habit to live in large groups, and many of the benefits we enjoy as modern
humans stem from such societies. The
helpless child is born into a family unit which protects and nurtures it for
maybe 20 years; then the adult is released into the world, and the role of the
family is taken over by society. Very
few individuals live outside society, and their behaviour, the behaviour of
monks, hermits and recluses, cannot be considered typical; I make no apology
for omitting them from the current picture.
This is the point of synthesis for all the ideas presented so
far. Most of the ideas are not at all
new, but putting them together in this way, it seems to me, achieves a new and
powerful way to understand who we are.
It is not a parable, a metaphor for some 'deeper' message; as far as I
can see, this is just how it is. This
seems like a good place to draw all the threads together and to summarise the
key points I've tried to make.
Evolution is a mathematical process by which order inevitably
emerges out of chaos. On Earth, DNA
evolved as the genetic material, the stuff of which the immortal genes are
made. The genes created a global
machine to ensure their own perpetuation.
The elements of the machine are organisms, billions of individuals, the
characteristics of which are determined by the genes themselves. Over the years, the machine was improved by
evolution. The high point was reached
with the emergence of humans. In human
brains, genes successfully handed over the control of human behaviour to memes,
entities which determine behaviour, and which are analogous to genes, but which
evolve millions of times faster than genes.
The memes quickly made humans the dominant species on Earth, the most
powerful beings the planet has yet known.
Humans are born with instincts, gene determined memes, but very
few of them. From this small beginning
they evolve the many other memes they will need to control their
behaviour. Two of the memes they create
initially are: 'Something's Happening' and 'I Am'. These two memes provoke the questions: 'What's Happening?' and
'What should I do?' In trying to answer
these two questions, the infant creates a number of 'working memes' which it
puts into two categories: Truth and Right.
The infant develops a faculty which vets new memes for admission to
these categories: the Intuition. This
faculty is capable of integrating the many qualities which the memes present
into a single Quality, which, for the memes that pass the test, is recognised
as Beauty. Intuition works by putting
the meme candidates through a 'dry run' on a Model of Reality. Intuition has developed an 'ear' for the
smooth running of this Model. How well Intuition
and the Model develop is largely a matter of luck.
As humans, most of our fundamental memes are laid down by the
Infant Genius, a child less than 3 years old, in wordless images before
Language is acquired. In general, we
are not conscious of these early ideas.
Language is the viral form of memes, and is grounded in the unconscious
understanding of the early Model.
Language, and memes in general, though created by the infant, are shaped
by imitation, by the conditioning of parents, and by the conditioning of
nature. The infant seeks parental
approval and practical success. From
the collection of memes built up in this way, the infant creates the Model and
develops Intuition. By the time
Language is mastered, the fundamental memes are already laid down; the rest of
the individual's life is most often concerned with day to day matters, with
which Language and Reason can deal comfortably, rather than with ideas. But we are all occasionally confused, and occasionally
some of us become philosophers.
Philosophy, religion and mysticism are attempts to contact the
unconscious memes laid down before Language was acquired, an attempt to
'remember' and to verbalise these memes.
Science is organised Reason, the faculty we developed as infants to
'sort things out' into categories with tags, and the faculty from which
Language is derived. Art is the product
of the Aesthetic sense, another name for Intuition. The entire human endeavour is an attempt by the memes to
perpetuate themselves. The strategy they
have been obliged to adopt is to model Reality as closely as possible. One definition of Reality is that it is that
meme which is immortal; by approaching Reality memes approach immortality.
This section is about as near as I shall get to actually answering
the question 'What's Happening?' I had
thought I would leave this question aside, but I think it emphasises the power
and beauty of meme theory that it can tackle such a question, so here goes.
Evolution is a physical law, the Third Law of Thermodynamics if
you like. It explains many phenomena,
not merely the development of life on Earth.
After the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of a ball of energy,
pure light. There was no matter. Matter only 'condensed' out of the light
when the ball had expanded sufficiently, so that the 'temperature' of the
light, its density, had dropped below a critical point, its 'freezing
point'. The fact that the Universe
constantly expands, and so constantly cools is related to entropy, change, and
time. You can think of it as giving the
lost heat somewhere to flow to. The
first matter to condense out of the Sea of Light was a mixture of protons and
electrons - plasma. This condensation
is an example of some new stability emerging from the chaos of the light. Just as a single crystal seeds the
crystalisation of a vessel full of solution, so the condensation of a proton
'seeded' the condensation of the other protons; an example of propagation of
stability. It was some time before the
Universe cooled enough for the electrons and protons to condense further, to
form hydrogen - the next 'plateau' of stability.
The next actor on the stage is gravity. It is tempting to try and suggest that gravity is connected with
evolution, that one is a corollary of the other or that they are both
corollaries of some greater principle.
But I'm not enough of a physicist to do it. There does seem to be an 'attractive principle' whereby like
substances separate out from mixtures and group together: water is distilled
into pure rain water, oil and water form two separate layers, rock grains are
separated according to their solubility in water and their size (the speed with
which they settle). All these processes
are driven by energy systems: the gravity of Earth, or the heat of the Earth or
Sun (both results themselves of gravity).
So gravity seems to be the greater principle. Another avenue is that gravity is a distortion in space-time; if
time is created by entropy, then perhaps gravity is a corollary of entropy? This would make entropy, time, gravity and
evolution all statistical phenomena, pure mathematics. Just a thought.
The cloud of hydrogen that the comprised Universe was not
completely uniform - there were local dense regions and sparse regions. The action of gravity on these regions was
to form stars, and collections of stars (galaxies), and collections of galaxies
(clusters). This was the third stable
plateau. Planets formed when some of
the stars exploded, scattering debris around the galaxies which was trapped by
other stars to form solar systems (plateau 4).
By such means, the Earth was formed over four billion years ago.
It is probably true to say that conditions on Earth were just
right for Life to evolve. But that
isn't saying much. Here we are, so
conditions must have been right. It
would make not a jot of difference if the probability that such conditions
arose 'by accident' were fantastically small: one in a billion billion billion. Perhaps we are just incredibly lucky. The fact that Life evolved means that for
whatever reason, conditions were just right for this to happen. Why posit the existence of an outside agent
to 'set things up'? It is simpler,
neater and perfectly satisfactory to assume we are just dead lucky. My hunch is that we are not all that lucky,
and that evolution is such a powerful phenomenon that Life could evolve almost
anywhere.
Conditions were conducive to the evolution of Life (plateau 5),
therefore Life evolved (plateau 6).
There was no single point at which Life emerged from the chemical soup,
it was a gradual process. As I have
suggested here, evolution has been at work since the Universe exploded in the
Big Bang, achieving new stable states, new plateaux. Life is the 'cream' on top of the milk that evolution produces:
Order out of Chaos. Because Earth is a
dynamic chemical system, energy being constantly fed in from the Sun, it is
constantly 'bettering' itself (evolution).
The living machine, the Biosphere, has altered conditions to what they
are now so as to make Life more comfortable.
There is no longer any trace of the early chemical systems which
developed DNA and the genetic mechanism.
In a sense, DNA won and it eliminated all the opposition. My guess is that as computer simulation
becomes more sophisticated and powerful, it will be used to accurately model
these early chemical systems so that we will one day be able to say with more
confidence exactly how genes began.
I made a point of emphasising that conditions must have been 'just
right' on Earth for life to evolve, and one need not posit an outside agent to
bring this about - it just happened.
This reasoning is equally valid when applied to the larger question of
the origin of the Universe itself. The
sort of thinking that posits an outside agent to create Life might argue
something like this:
'The conditions that currently pertain in the Universe are just
too finely tuned, too perfectly set up, engineered to too great a precision for
them to have occurred by pure chance. If
any of a hundred parameters were different to one part in a million million,
the Universe could simply not exist.
This suggests, therefore, that the parameters were preset by a conscious
outside agent, the being we call God.'
I disagree. What can it possibly
mean to say that the Universe could not have arisen by pure chance? For all we know, billions upon billions of
universes have been 'tried out' in the past, each with its own random
hodge-podge of physical laws. Perhaps
none of them lasted more than a few nanoseconds, or one or two may have managed
to stick it out for a few million years, and then fizzled out. But we live in this Universe; aren't we
lucky? Twenty billion years old and
still going strong. Where does God come
in? In fact, I don't suppose other
universes did exist in the past; I suspect that our Universe is the only
possible one. Another point is that
Time did not exist until the Universe did, so it is nonsense to talk about
'past' universes existing 'before' ours.
But what happens outside the Universe, in Eternity, is anyone's
guess! However you look at it, this
Universe exists and its like it is. The
answer to 'Why is it like it is?' might as well be 'It just is.' If it wasn't like this, we wouldn't be here
to ask these questions. This is not a
reason for the Universe to be thus, it is just a consequence of it.
Perhaps you are still sceptical: 'Yes I see what you are saying,
but my question is this: Why should there be anything at all?' To this I would answer: Why not? There doesn't have to be a cause for or a
purpose to the Universe: it simply is!
An idea I find helpful is this.
The Universe exists, so it clearly isn't impossible for it to do
so. But suppose it was very improbable:
one in as-large-a-number-as-you-like.
If this means anything at all, it means that one would have to wait a
very long time indeed for the Universe to just spontaneously happen. But how long? In the Timeless Void of non-existence which is all that there was
before anything really was, the question 'How long?' is itself
meaningless. One second is as 'long' as
billions of years. One wouldn't have to
wait any time at all. Even if we
suppose some sort of Eternal Time which we allow to pass just to make the idea
of probability work, and we allow for an unimaginable amount of it to pass,
eventually, since the Universe is not actually impossible, it would suddenly
exist. Only if the Universe was
impossible would one have to wait for ever, so that the Universe never came
into existence. Since it is not
impossible, it had to happen eventually.
As a last ditch defence, someone might try this: 'The Universe
cannot possibly exist unless some agency, something outside the Universe is
constantly maintaining it, all the time preventing every last atom and particle
in every galaxy from ceasing to exist.'
Actually, I don't have any particular problem with this. It seems a bit far fetched - a lot of
trouble for this outside agency to go to - but as long as this agency is
outside our Universe, whatever that means, then one can suppose whatever one
likes about it. The only effect we
would notice is that things would exist, and they would carry on existing,
which is not saying a lot. It is only
when this outside agency is supposed to have any other effect on our Universe
besides maintaining it that I would have difficulty. In particular, I fail to see the need to identify the outside
agency with the Deity.
It seems to me that Evolution is sufficient explanation for the existence
of Life on Earth, and therefore for the existence of Man. There is no need to posit God, and it
complicates things immensely if you try to do so. But Evolution has been working since the Big Bang - still no need
to bring God into it. And from my
argument above about the Creation of the Universe, God is not required there
either. The Creator God was a useful
meme, a simplistic explanation which sufficed until the pieces of the jigsaw
finally fell into place; until a new meme with better credentials emerged. Now we know 'Who The Creator is':
Evolution. By extending the concept of
Evolution to cover all systems, not just 'living' systems, we can see that the
emergence of Order out of Chaos is just inevitable. The development of the Universe after the Big Bang was
inevitable. The occurrence of the Big
Bang itself was inevitable.
However, there are other reasons to believe in a God besides the
awesome power of Nature and dignity of Man.
Even if the Creator God has lost out, is there not room for another kind
of God, a Personal God? If we look into
this idea, we find its root is not outside ourselves, but within
ourselves. We have created God because
we need Him; we need somebody to love us.
God exists as a meme. This kind
of existence puts God on a par with any other idea we can have, be it
evolution, gravity, water, rocks or Tuesday.
But these other ideas have a property that God doesn't have; we can
objectively test for their existence, they are aspects of Reality. It is not possible to prove that God exists
(many people have tried), except as a very powerful concept in which many
people believe passionately.
The origin of the meme is in our early childhood. Before we found out that Mum and Dad were
just human beings exactly like ourselves, we treated them as God. The fact that there were two of them was not
relevant (does God have two hands?).
When God the parents was no more, we were at a bit of a loss. In some families, this hole is never filled,
but in religious families, the hole is filled by the meme God. Father says 'Obey me, but obey God first'
and mother says 'I love you, but God loves you more'. This is a great comfort to the child, who is seriously worried
about his parent's human frailty. 'Who
is going to look after me when my parents are gone?' asks the child, or 'Who is
looking after all the children and grown ups who haven't got a Mum and
Dad?' The child isn't able to grasp
that one day he will be able to look after himself - and in some ways he is
right to be sceptical about it; many people grow up being unable to look after
themselves, and they look for other members of society, their friends or their
partners, to substitute for the parents they desperately need. In terms of TA, Transactional Analysis, this
need is felt by the Child (one of the three ego states) which may not trust its
own Adult and Parent (they are all it has to rely on) if they haven't so far
managed to fulfil all its desires. Very
few people are totally self reliant, and those that are usually have some great
faith to support them; faith in themselves, perhaps, or in God.
Even if the infant is happy at the time with God as his protector,
he may not be happy later when he grows up and learns more about life. After all if Father Christmas doesn't exist,
why should God? Surely He's next for
the chop? Or perhaps the child grows
into a thoughtful individual with a philosophical leaning. He will most likely find the notion of God
rather too simplistic. And what of the
child raised by 'heathens' - what is there for them to believe in? There are a number of strategies - two of
the commonest are: one, to just keep looking, be sceptical, learn as much as
possible, ask questions, to make The Search the meaning of one's life; or two,
to just accept something as the answer, anything will do, no matter how bizarre
or dangerous: drugs, drink, sex, flower-power, money, power, violence. These two strategies, poles apart, account
the behaviour of a great many modern adults these days, now that the churches
are empty.
The Creator God is no longer needed now we have Evolution; is
there any replacement for the Personal God which people clearly need if their
lives are not to be meaningless? As I
have hinted at above, the state one wants to achieve is one of
self-reliance. If you need to be loved,
love yourself. Trite? Well, yes; put as starkly as that. It would take more space than I have
allocated myself to do justice to the idea of loving oneself. But lets be clear what I am not saying. I am not suggesting that one should become
utterly selfish, nor that one should become an egotist, nor that would should
assume an air of great self-importance and arrogance, nor that one should
sacrifice everything for the sake of some burning ambition. In fact you don't have to do anything. Its not a prescription for any behaviour at
all. It is simply an attitude, a
belief.
The TA school put it like this. Say to yourself: I'm Okay. It's not enough to just say it, of course,
you have to believe it. And you have to
believe all the corollaries that follow from it: 'I can cope, I am confident, I
like myself, I like other people, There's nothing I can't handle, I'm not
scared of anything, I can take it whatever it is, There is nothing I can't do
if I set my mind to it, I am calm, I am relaxed, It's going to be all
right'. And a whole lot more.
I have said that I can't do justice to this new meme: I'm
Okay. But in a sense this entire essay
has been an attempt to do this one meme justice. The meme is part of a meme cluster, it is easier to accept the
whole cluster than try to fit the new meme in on its own. This is the tight circle of ideas I
mentioned way back, elements of which I have been repeating throughout and
certain of which I have elaborated upon in order to illustrate the power of
meme theory. I haven't exhausted the
list of memes in the cluster but they include: Reality, Self, the Model,
Intuition, Reason, Truth, Beauty, Right, Good, Quality, Growth, I can, I'm
Okay, You're Okay, and It's Okay.
Each of these memes can be given short 'operational' descriptions
which explain how they interact (this essay is the full description). Truth: what works. Right: behaviour that that works. Good: describes memes that work.
Quality: the sum of all aspects.
Beauty: Quality of Good memes.
Intuition: that which judges the memes.
Reason: that which sorts out Reality.
The Model: sum of all our memes, our current approximation to Reality,
built by Intuition. 'Self' (as distinct
from 'self' which is just how we represent ourselves in our Model) is a
particular meme towards which we aspire.
Reality is what we are obliged to model. The closer our Model gets to Reality, the more successful and
self-reliant we are, and the closer our memes get to achieving the immortal
meme, Self. Growth is becoming closer
to Reality. The Assertions (I can, I'm
Okay, You're Okay, It's Okay) are a defence against 'bad memes', past errors,
mistakes we once made which limited us in the past, and which may stage a come
back later. As we Grow, our Intuition
improves, our Model improves, our insight improves (the ability to explain
external phenomena), and our 'wisdom' improves (our ability to reflect, to know
ourselves). Prayer and meditation are
simply the act of contacting the Self via the Model.
All individuals aspire to achieve the Self, the immortal
meme. Were they to achieve it they
would each have a single Model, they
would be one person, known to Buddhists as Buddha. The extent to which we are rid of useless and 'bad' memes, and
have a Model which is close to Reality, defines what stage of Growth we are at,
how many questions we still have, how content we are, how free of misery, how
powerful, how active, how free.
Is it possible for two brains to achieve identical Models? Can we all be Buddha? I doubt it.
But it is a standard to aim for, a point on the horizon, a Pole Star to
plot our course by. The idea is not to
get their but to travel, to live, and to enjoy the journey.
What I have tried to do here is to take the evolutionary paradigm
and the genetic paradigm one stage further; to apply them to the evolution of
both the Universe, and the Mind of Man.
On the way, explanations for a great many related phenomena have emerged. Memes, culture, learning, and wisdom. The origin of memes, our distant childhood,
how we are haunted by old memes, the origin of mystical, religious and
philosophical ideas. Behaviour,
psychology, bad memes, and early errors.
The origins of tyranny, sadism, defeatism and fear. A very wide range of effects for what is
basically quite a simple but elegant theory.
And I haven't really said very much that is actually new. It is the power and beauty of the idea that
leads me to accept its validity. Using
the terms I have defined, I must maintain that this meme is True - it works; at
least it works for me! The Model I now
seem to have by virtue of the new meme is, more than any other model I have yet
had presented to me, closer than ever to Reality.