So why does evolution does not explain everything, and especially culture

Here is summarized the conclusions drawn by Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto in his book "A Foot in the River":

Basic to entente biology and history is the acknowledgement of three facts: that culture is not uniquely human; that the existence of culture depends on evolution in the sense that we can only do anything with the physical and cerebral equipment evolution has given us; but that culture also changes independently of evolution, which should not be expected to have infinitely elastic powers of explanation.

(Chapter 8, "Towards the planet of apes") Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto goes on:

The mutations that make for a multiplicity of culture are different from those that kick off organic changes: they are capricious, but not random; they are devised by minds, not spontaneous; typically, they do not replicate according to the incidence of any advantage, nor does their success or failure respond necessarily to environmental constraints or opportunities.

(Chapter 8, "Towards the planet of apes")

See this old blog post that is relevant to this topic.

Uncertainty in science and the bridge to humanities

Felipe describes in his book "A Foot in the River" how, because so-called hard sciences opened the door to the possibility that there is a limit to our knowledge, it also built a bridge toward humanities, the so-called soft sciences:

At least two positive effects have ensued. First, it no longer seems realistic to demand a predictable cosmos, ruled by definitive, unbending laws and bound by links of cause and effect. The causes may still be there, but are often untraceable. The effects may still there but are often untrackable. Second, science has come to seem more approachable and more intelligible from the perspectives of other disciplines: less hard-edged, more yielding; less cocksure, more flexible; less definitive, more open-ended; less confident of solutions, more entranced by problems. After a long period in which humanities and social studies have tried to be more scientific, science has begun to look more like art. Science has let its hair down and become more arty.

(Chapter 8, "Toward the planet of the apes")

See this old blog post that is relevant to this topic.

Across the scientific fields

Philip Anderson argues that although reductionism is the effective way to do science, it does not necessarily lead to an understanding of the whole:

"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe."

P. Anderson, More is different, in Science (1972), vol. 177.

For him, science is fundamental not only at the level of particles but also at every higher and more complex levels: an object, a fluid, an ocean, a body, a society, Earth, the Universe:

"The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other."

P. Anderson, More is different, in Science (1972), vol. 177.

This point of view of science(s) has also been recently expressed by Edward O. Wilson in his book Consilience. and Ian Stewart in his book Does God play dice?.

The structure of science

Ian Stewart, in his book Does God Play Dice?, describes how science is structured. The explanations and theories provided by science are hierarchic; they start from the theories of fundamental particles and atoms, follow through theories of fluid dynamics, ecosystem, etc and finish with theories of sociology and art. Each explanation is constructed on top of the theories that are at a lowest level but in the same time, it does not care of the detail of these lower-level theories: the equations of fluid dynamics are constructed for a small water parcel, typically several moles of water, but it does not care about the individual atoms, nor about the fact that gravity has yet to be explained by the physics of particles. This important view of science is also shared by Edward O. Wilson in his book Consilience. Here is Ian Stewart's quote:

"Current science possesses no truly fundamental theories - not in the sense that they describe what nature actually does. They are all approximations, valid within some reasonably well-defined domain. Quantum mechanics work well at the submicroscopic level. General relativity is great for describing entire universes [...]. Science is a patchwork of models, each of which has been enormously refined within its own domain. The models habitually disagree when those patches overlap. Some disagreements are relatively harmless: atomic theory and continuum fluid mechanics disagree on the fine structure of water, holding it to be respectively to be discrete and infinitely divisible, but on macroscopic scales continuity and discreteness effectively approximate each other. Others are fatal: for example, as I write, the best current theory of astrophysics and the best current theory of cosmology compel us to accept stars older than the universe that contains them. Today's science is a pluralist patchwork of locally valid models, not a global monolith. Indeed it succeeds because it is a pluralist pacthwork of locally valid models.
Our concept of explanation is also a patchwork. A philosophical model that fits it well is what Richard Dawkins calls 'hierarchical reductionism', which sees scientific theories as a hierarchical structure, with some on different levels from others, corresponding to different levels of description of phenomena. (The hierarchy is not rigid and the levels need not be like layers of bricks in a wall.) For example, the complexities of ecosystems are explained by referring them back to those of organisms; organisms are explained by the growth of spatially organized proteins and other macromolecules; the complex organization of organisms is referred back to the linear complexity of their DNA code; the complexity of DNA is referred back to combinations of simpler atoms - and so on, right back to the Theory of Everything.
As Dawkins rightly remarks, it is not necessary to trace every phenomenon right back down this chain of reductions in order to understand it. Chemistry can be considered as 'given' for the purposes of understanding DNA; DNA can be taken as 'given' for the purpose of understanding protein manufacture in organisms, and so on.
[...]
What we tend to forget, when told a story with this structure, is that it could have had many different beginnings. Anything that lets us start from the molecular level would have done just as well. A totally different subatomic theory would be an equally valid starting-point for the story, provided it led to the same general feature of a replicable molecule. [...] It has to be or else we would never be able to keep a goat [within a wooden fence] without first doing a Ph.D. in subatomic physics."

Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice?, Farewell, Deep Thought.

The universal smile

E. O. Wilson tells us here how smiling is a universal physiological character:

"Within the face the mouth is the principal instrument of visual communication. The smile in particualr is a rich site of secondary epigenetic rules. Psychologists and anthropologists have discovered substantial degrees of similar programmed development in the uses of smiling across cultures. The expression is first displayed by infants between the ages of two and four months. It invariably attracts an abundance of affection from attending adults. Environment has little influence on the maturation of smiling. The infants of the !Kung, a hunter-gatherer people of South Africa's Kalahari desert, are nurtured under vey different conditions from those in America and Europe. [...] Yet their smile is identical in form to that of American and European infants, appears at the same time, and serves the same social function. Smiling also appears on schedule in deaf-blind children and even in thalidomide-deformed children who are not only deaf and blind but also crippled so badly they cannot touch their own faces."

E. O. Wilson, Consilience, From genes to culture.

The respective role of science and art

This is a difficult subject mixing neurobiology with the interpretation of art. Edward O. Wilson offers, however, a simple distinction between science and art. Science can translate a certain perception into another language. "We [humans] can translate the energies of magnetism and electricity into sight and sound, the sensory modalities we biologically possess. We can read the active neural circuits of bees and fish by scanning their sense organs and brains". By doing so, we can then know what type of perception all species possess assuming that each perception corresponds to a specific and different neural activity.

But what science cannot translate is the feeling of the perception. We will a priori never be able to feel the magnetic and electric perceptions of the bees and fish. We can imagine it. We can study it. But we cannot experience it. "But", as Edward O. Wilson emphasizes, "incapacity is not the point" as art fulfils another role. "Art [...] transmits feelings among persons of the same capacity. In other words, science explains feeling, while art transmits it."

But Wilson wonders "how can we know for sure that art communicates this way with accuracy, that people really, truly feel the same in the presence of art?". My personal answer to this question is: who cares? Do we have to know if the feeling transmitted by art is the same for every person? As long as something is transmitted, as long as art triggers some kind of reaction, a good or a bad feeling, as long as an original message has been sent and received, that is what matters according to me. But this is my usual romantic definition of art. A bit anarchic and maybe too relativistic.

But what if art does transmits the same feeling? what a victory for a universal language. Wilson thinks that it is indeed the case. And how do we know it? "We know it intuitively by the sheer weight of our cumulative responses through the many media of art. We know it by detailed verbal descriptions of emotion, by critical analyses, and in fact through the data from all the vast, nuanced and interlocking armamentaria of the humanities".

A difficult and fascinating subject indeed.

A brief history and critic of complexity theory

This is a brief history synthesized by E. O. Wilson in Consilience of the accomplishments and promises of the science of complexity as well as its present drawbacks and its objectives needed to be fulfilled to convince a larger portion of the science community.

"Complexity theory was born in the 1970s, gathered momentum in the early 1980s, and was envelopped in controversy by the mid-1990s. The issues of contention are almost as tangled as the systems the theorists hoped to unravel. I think it possible to cut to the heart of the matter, as follows. The great majority of scientists, their minds focused narrowly on well-defined phenomena, do not care about complexity theory. Many have not yet heard of it. [...] Those who care can be divided into three camps. The first comprises a heterogeneous scattering of skeptics. They believe that brains and rain forests are too complicated ever to be reduced to elementary processes, let alone reconstituted in a manner that predicts the whole. Some of the skeptics doubt the existence of deep laws of complexity, at least any that can be grasped by the human mind.

In the second camp are the fervent advocates, a band of audacious complexity theorists, exemplified by Stuart Kauffman (author of the The origins of order) and Christopher Langton, who work at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, unofficial headquarters of the complexity movement. They believe not only that deep laws exist but that their discovery is on the near horizon. Some of the essential elements of the laws, they say, are already emerging from mathematical theories that use exotic conceptions such as chaos, self-criticality, and adaptative landscapes.[...] Their grail is a set of hoped-for master algorithms that will speed passage from atom to brain and ecosystem, consistent with reality but requiring far less factual knowledge than would be needed without the algorithms.

The third group of scientists, of which I am a reluctant member, has settled along positions strung between the two extremes of rejection and unbridled support. I say reluctant, because I would like to be a true believer: I really am impressed by the sophistication and élan of the complexity theorists, and my heart is with them. But my mind is not, at least not yet. I believe with many other centrists that they are on the right track -but only more or less, maybe, and still far short of success. [...] The basic difficulty, to put the matter plainly, is an insufficiency of facts. [...] The postulates they start with clearly need more detail. Their conclusions thus far too vague and general to be more than rallying metaphors, and their abstract conclusions tell us very little that is really new.
[...]
None of the elements of complexity theory has anything like the generality and the fidelity to factual detail we wish from theory. None has triggered an equivalent cascade of theoretical innovations and practical applications. What does complexity theory need to be successful [...]?

Complexity theory needs more empirical information."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (Chapter 5)

Obviously, this discussion needs to be continued and I will keep posting critics and successes of complexity theory.

From complexity to reductionism and back to complexity

Edward O. Wilson in his Consilience describes the two fundamental steps of science to understand Nature. First, you need to break down the processes into simple blocks. That is reductionism. Then you need to build back the complexity of the system. "To dissect a phenomenon into its elements, [...] is consilience by reduction. To reconstitute it, and especially to predict with knowledge gained by reduction how nature assembled it in the first place, is consilience by synthesis. That is the two-step procedure by which natural scientists generally work: top down across two or three levels of organization at a time by analysis, then bottom up across the same levels by synthesis" (Chapter 5).

"The greatest challenge today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems. Scientists have broken down many kinds of systems. They think they know most of the elements and forces. The next task is to reassemble them, at least in mathematical models that capture the key properties of the entire ensembles. Success in this enterprise will be measured by the power researchers acquire to predict emergent phenomena when passing from general to more specific levels of organization. That in simplest terms is the great challenge of scientific holism" (Chapter 5).

There is also an order of complexity. From "simple" to more complex, we find: physics, followed by biology, followed by sociology, with the arts closing the chain. "[T]he opposite journey from physics to end points, is extremely problematic. As the distance away from physics increases, the options allowed by the antecedent disciplines increase exponentially. Biology is almost unimaginably more complex than physics, and the arts equivalently more complex than biology. To stay on course all the way seems impossible. And worse, we cannot know before departure whether the complete journey we have imagined even exits" (Chapter 5).

"The profane word now having been spoken on hallowed ground, a quick disclaimer is in order. While it is true that science advances by reducing phenomena to their working elements -by dissecting brains into neurons, for example, and neurons into molecules- it does not aim to diminish the integrity of the whole. On the contrary, synthesis of the elements to re-create their original assembly is the other half of scientific procedure. In fact, it is the ultimate goal of science" (Chapter 10).

Such disclaimer should lessen the critics of reductionism. Reductionism is a fundamental stage that we need to go through to understand Nature. We have barely started to reconstruct the parts. Patience.

The brain and the learning process

Edward O. Wilson explains why it is difficult to understand how the brain works; the brain was made to survive, not to understand itself:

"All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.
That is why even today people know more about their automobiles than they do about their own minds-and why the fundamental explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical or religious quest. It requires a journey into the brain's interior darkness with preconceptions left behind. The ships that brought us here are to be left scuttled and burning at the shore."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, Chapter 6.

Maybe, such explanation may give a beginning of answer of why passion -or the absence of reason- plays such an important role in human society.

A salute to the Romantic and Postmodern movements

Although Edward O. Wilson disagrees in general with the ideas of and motivations behind the Romantic and Postmodern movements, here is what he has to say about them:

"As today's celebrants of corybantic Romanticism, they enrich culture. They say to the rest of us: Maybe, just maybe, you are wrong. Their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away from all directions, bevoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects. That is one reason to think well of postmodernism, even as it menaces rational thought. Another is the relief it affords those who have chosen not to encumber themselves with a scientific education. Another is the small industry it has created within philosophy and literary studies. Still another, the one that counts the most, is the unyielding critique of traditional scholarship it provides. We will always need postmodernists or their rebellious equivalents. For what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces? John Stuart Mill correctly noted that teacher and learner alike fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field. And if somehow, against all the evidence, against all reason, the linchpin falls out and everything is reduced to epistemological confusion, we will find the courage to admit that the postmodernists were right, and in the best spirit of the Enlightenment, we will start over again. Because, as the great mathematician David Hilbert once said, capturing so well that part of the human spirit expressed through the Enlightenment, Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know, we will know."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, Chapter 3

universality versus relativism, reductionism versus complexity

This is an ambitious post and the topics are larger than life but I would like to share here some thoughts from The moment of complexity by Mark. C. Taylor. At the beginning of his essay, Taylor gives us an original account of the history of the debate on, let's say it, how to see the world: are there universal laws or is everything relative - culturally rather than physically speaking? what is the correct method to comprehend Nature, reduce the problem to a series of simple problem or see it as a whole? These are of course very general and deep questions, which may have as many answers as sand grain on a beach. But this does not prevent us to, at least, discuss about it.

Taylor details the philosophy of several intellectuals, among whom that of Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is an advocate of universal laws and a reductionist view of the human culture. He is quoted saying:

"By drawing up an inventory of all the customs that had been observed, all those imagined in myths, those evoked in the games of children and adults, and the dreams of healthy and sick individuals and psychopathological behaviors, one would be able to draw up a period table like that of the chemical elements, in which all real or merely possible customs would appear grouped in families, and in which we would simply need to recognize those which societies have in fact adopted.

(Lévi-Strauss, quoted in The moment of complexity by Mark. C. Taylor, chapter 2; italics are mine)

There are many advocates of the other point of view, one of them, and maybe not the most clearer one according to Taylor, is Foucault. Foucault does not deny there are some kind of universal laws but he insists that these laws have been constructed within our own cultural frame, so that these laws are not, I will dare to say it, "universal enough":

"[W]hile admitting that there is an «order of things», he insists that this order is neither natural nor essential and thus cannot be preordained or unchanging. Whatever order is at work the world is historically contingent and therefore to a certain extent arbitrary."

(Mark C. Taylor, The moment of complexity, chapter 2)

This debate is typical between the scientist who applies reductionism in a professional way, and the humanist who restrains himself from doing so. Taylor writes "[w]hile certain scientists tend to reduce culture to nature, many humanists defiantly reduce nature to culture" (Mark C. Taylor,The moment of complexity, chapter 7). For the former, the understanding of human culture and its psychology is attainable from the study of the building blocks that are the genes: you have or have not the gene of painting, singing, writing, seeing the world this way and not this way etc. For the later, nature itself is a psychological construction different between individuals so that little can be said in general.

For Edward O. Wilson, reductionism, far from denying the complexity of nature, should rather be seen as a tool, not a philosophy or a statement about the world. For him, reductionism is "the search strategy employed to find points of entry into otherwise impenetrably complex systems. Complexity is what interests scientists in the end, not simplicity" (Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the unity of knowledge, cited in The moment of complexity, chapter 2). Edward O. Wilson adds the following lucid statement:

"The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science."

A sensible illustration of such confrontation is also amazingly found in Lettre à D., Histoire d'un amour by André Gorz writing about the different way his wife, an englishwoman, and himself, influenced by French universalism, think:

"J'avais besoin de théorie pour structurer ma pensée et t'objectais qu'une pensée non structurée menace toujours de sombrer dans l'empirisme et l'insignifiance. Tu répondais que la théorie menace toujours de devenir un carcan qui interdit de percevoir la complexité mouvante du réel."

Although I have a lot of respect about critics of science, because as Descartes said we should always doubt, I have to admit that Edward O. Wilson's view seems correct. As again and again, the conclusion from this debate is not so much that one side is necessarily correct and the other wrong, but that each point of view is adapted to different situations or goals.

To conclude this little post, I would like to bring to your attention that according to Marc C. Taylor, it is possible to go beyond this classic debate. One of the mind-blowing example is the feedback that an idea can have on the brain itself. For instance, in linguistic, there is an academic school which thinks that the brain developed also from the use of the words themselves. Terrence Deacon writes that "the major structural and functional innovations that make human brains capable of unprecedented mental feats evolved in response to the use of something as abstract and virtual as the power of words" (T. Deacon, The coevolution of language and the brain, cited in The moment of complexity, chapter 7). James Gardner says also that "information can and does flow upstream into the genome from the particular extended phenotype we know as human civilization" (cited in The moment of complexity, chapter 7).

Applied to the debate surrounding reductionism as I understand it, the simple schema the scientific community chooses to describe Nature would have a certain effect on the brain over time, would physiologically improve it so that the brains of the scientists would come up with a new schema, more adapted to the world. In some way, it is true that the view of science has evolved and still evolves dramatically ; the idea here is that the improvement in the description of Nature has not been completely independent of the previous descriptions; in other words, the description of the world at a certain time has helped to shape the new description at a later time via a physiological change of the brain itself. In this case, reductionism still is the basic tool to comprehend Nature, but the reductionist schema has some internal subjectivity associated with the physiological limits of the brain. I do not know how far this is accepted but it is true that, if correct, it enlarges the debate and may bring possibilities to accommodate both the scientist and the humanist.