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.

Additional quotes from "A foot in the river" by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

"There is no reason for God and Darwin to be rival deities--except in the minds clouded by passion"

Chapter 5, The Limits of Evolution

The effort to invoke biology to explain history has failed because it is basically ill conceived. History, to quote a collaboration between an eminent scientist and an eminent historian, is 'too generally messy' for scientific treatment. Societies do not change by transmission and inheritance, but by acquisition and acculturation. History seems unDarwinian precisely because it is a story of the survival of the unfittest. The societies we class as least evolved, least complex, least developed, with fewest parts, last longer--while elaborate civilizations become playgrounds and photo-ops for romancers amid ruins. Culture is just too different from organic life to invite the same kind of explanation. Cells are self-organizing systems that adapt to survive and resist permeation by hostile intrusions from outside. Cultures, by contrast, are built for chaos and as prone to self-destruction as to survival.

Chapter 5, The Limits of Evolution

Quotes from "A foot in the river" by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

"Maybe there no causes to know, or, at least, maybe much that happens is uncaused. Anyone who thinks that everything is explicable as the result of something else--who sees causation as the 'cement of the universe', making each event adhere closely to the next--may be the victim of an unwarranted assumption. 'Just-so' explanations may be the only true ones." (Chapter 3)

A quote from early in Chapter 3 where the author starts to develop his theory that future human events might not be predictable, a theory that goes opposite to that of Pierre-Simon Laplace but is in line (albeit for different reasons) with that of Karl Popper.

"Empathy is the heart of understanding" (Chapter 3)

 A quote that summarizes, according to the author, a principle of anthropological field work as well as of life followed by Franz Boas.

Science explaining the battle of sexes?

R. Dawkins takes notice of the comment made in a scientific paper written by  Schuster and Sigmund:

Briefly, then, we can draw two conclusions: (a) that the battle of sexes has much in common with predation; and (b) that the behavior of lovers is oscillating like the moon, and unpredictable as the weather. Of course, people didn't need differential equations to notice this before.

Schuster and Sigmund (1981), Coyness, philandering and stable strategies, in Animal Behavior, 29, 186-92. Quoted by R. Dawkins in the note of p. 153 in his 30th anniversary paperback edition of The Selfish Gene.

Rooms for letters

"Writing, a cultural tool, has evolved to make use of the inferotemporal neurons'preference for certain shapes. «Letter shape,», Dehaene writes, «is not an arbitrary cultural choice. The brain constrains the design of an efficient writing system so severely that there is little room for cultural relativism. Our primate brain only accepts a limited set of written shapes."

Oliver Sacks, in A Man of letters, The New Yorker, June 28, 2010.

Notes from The Ages of Gaia by James Lovelock

First, let's start with a word of wisdom:

"The young usually find the constraints of convention too heavy to escape, except as part of a cult. The middle-aged have no time to spare from the conservative business of living. Only the old can happily make fools of themselves."

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, Introductory.

The second point concerns entropy and the fact that has become more and more obvious to me recently, that for any achievement, from the construction of a building to that of an idea, waste is unavoidable and this waste represents the entropy that needs to be rejected for the achievement to be meaningful, to be out of the ordinary and randomness:

"You, as you read these words, are creating entropy by consuming oxygen and the fats and sugars stored in your body. As you breathe, you excrete waste products high in entropy into the air, such as carbon dioxide, and your warm body emits to your surroundings infrared radiation high in entropy. If your excretion of entropy is as large or larger than your internal generation of entropy, you will continue to live and remain a miraculous, improbable, but still legal avoidance of the second law of the Universe. «Excretion of entropy» is just a fancy way of expressing the dirty words excrements and pollution. [...] We animals pollute the air with carbon dioxide, and the vegetation pollutes it with oxygen. The pollution of one is the meat of another. Gaia [Planet Earth] is more subtle and, at least until humans appeared, polluted the region of the Solar System with no more than the gentle warmth of infrared radiation."

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, What is Gaia?

I will write, tomorrow, "Entropy" on the side of my garbage cans.

We keep going with an issue concerning the stability of a system and its level of complexity. Is the more complex a system, the more stable? This is, from what I have heard still a controversial issue. In his book, James Lovelock agrees with the theoretical ecologist, Robert May: the more complex a system, the more fragile and unstable and inversely. This goes maybe against the naive assumption that if a system has a greater diversity, it has a greater chance to handle external perturbation. But May's mathematics prove the contrary: "increasing complexity makes for dynamical fragility rather than robustness". Thus, "the complex natural ecosystems currently under siege in the tropics and subtropics are less able to withstand our battering than are the relatively simple temperate and boreal systems." (R. May, in Theoretical Ecology, cited in The Ages of Gaia, Exploring Daisyworld)

In the chapter Middle Ages, James Lovelock mentions an extraordinary theory that Earth biosphere would be responsible in part to...the plate tectonics:

"The geologist Don Anderson has speculated that the deposition of limestone on the ocean floor [via, for instance, the dying and sinking of Coccolithophores and the burying of their calcium shells] is a key factor in the motion of the Earth's crust. He proposed that sometime far back in the Earth's history, sufficient limestone was deposited to alter the chemical composition of the crustal rocks of the ocean floor near the continental margins. As a result an event, called the basalt-eclogite phase transition by geologists, took place. This transition so altered the physical properties of the crustal rocks that it became possible for the great machinery of plate movement to begin turning."

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, The Middle Ages.

This theory would explain why plate tectonics are not a universal properties of the planets. I have no idea, however, if this idea has been dropped or is still alive. More reading will be needed. But fascinating idea nonetheless.

I will finish on an improved definition of Gaia's theory, that also gives some explanation on the origin of the interaction between the biosphere and its environment. James Lovelock, himself, has corrected a previous definition of Gaia's theory and has re-defined it in his book as follows:

"Living organisms and their material environment are tightly coupled. The coupled system is a superorganism, and as it evolves there emerges a new property, the ability to self-regulate climate and chemistry."

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, Gaia since 1988.

In this definition, the co-evolution of the biosphere and its environment is the key to explain why the self-regulation of the system is a likely property. I know that there is a lot of criticisms against Gaia, even with this improved definition. Although I am also a bit skeptical, I am wondering why there is no such criticism relative to the thermal regulation of mammals. In this case as well, it should be hard to believe that cells can organize at such a higher level that the whole system succeeds in regulating its temperature. If such feast is possible for an organism, given the geological time over which evolution is working, why not for the Earth's system as well?

Einstein's empirical creed

Max Born, in his Physics in my generation, reports Einstein's empirical creed:

"Concepts which have been proved to be useful in ordering things easily acquire such an authority over us that we forget their human origin and accept them as invariable. Then they become 'necessities of thought','given a priori', etc. The path of scientific progress is then, by such errors, barred for a long time. It is therefore no useless game if we are insisting on analysing current notions and pointing out on what conditions their justification and usefulness depends, especially how they have grown from the data of experience. In this way their exaggerated authority is broken. They are removed, if they cannot properly legitimate themselves; corrected, if their correspondence to the given things was too negligently established; replaced by others, if a new system can be developed that we prefer for good reasons."

quoted in Physics in my generation, Einstein's statistical theories.

Those are the conditions necessary to the evolutionary march of ideas. I also like the comment that ideas are and will always be of human origin, simple, beautiful and the counterpart, inexact. In such, they are formations of the brain to make nature more understandable to our eyes; but they are not nature itself.

The anthropic principle and the evolution of the universes

This is a short note on the current controversies concerning the formation of our Universe, developed in the book What is your dangerous idea?. Recent research has come to the conclusion that for our present Universe to exist, the so-called 'universal constants' have to have precise values, otherwise, the formation of galaxies and stars would not occur at a pace for life to exist. Furthermore, string theorists are discovering that there is not a single solution (and a unique set of 'universal' constants) but a 'landscape' approaching 10⁵⁰⁰ solutions and there are thus maybe many other universes with different constants that lay beyond the limit of our own!

Those conclusions, although yet highly speculative, are in the same time 'exciting and humbling' according to Brian Greene, and I would add unsettling for some. Why unsettling? First, because it poses the fundamental question of the existence of our Universe and why we were so lucky in the first place that life can exist. One rhetoric is to state that it is not really luckiness because if our Universe would have different 'universal' constants, life would not exist and we would not be here to complain that we were not lucky: this is the so-called anthropic principle.

The second and most unsettling point of those conclusions is the realization that the idea of a 'universal' set of laws that would dictates all universes, laws that are fundamental and are at the bottom and origin of everything, might not exist. Instead, these laws would be valid only locally and be pure environmental facts:

"Well, [thoses ideas] do threaten physicists' fondest hope-the hope that some extraordinarily beautiful mathematical principle will be discovered that would completely and uniquely explain every detail of the laws of particle physics.
[...] What further worries many physicists is that the landscape may be so rich that almost anything can be found-any combination of physical constants, particle masses, and so forth. This, they fear, would eliminate the predictive power of physics. Environmental facts are nothing more than environmental facts. They worry that if everything is possible, there will be no way to falsify the theory-or, more to the point, no way to confirm it."

Leonard Susskind, The "landscape", in What is your dangerous idea?

"The end of «fundamental» theoretical physics (the search for fundamental microphysical laws-there will still be lots of work for physicist who investigate the host of complex phenomena at larger scales) might very well occur not with a theory of everything but with the recognition that all so-called fundamental theories that describe nature are purely phenomenological-that is, derivable from observational phenomena-and don't reflect any underlying grand mathematical structure of the universe which would allow a basic understanding of why the universe is the way it is."

Laurence M. Krauss, The world may be fundamentally inexplicable, in What is your dangerous idea?

I will conclude with two other ideas that, without resolving the problem and erase any controversy, are not the less interesting. One, presented in the book by Paul Steinhardt, is to make the assumption that the 'universal' constants are not constant but vary slowly with time, so slowly that 1) our universe had time to have shrink and expand cyclically many times already (which would suggest that the Universe is much older than actually thought) and 2) we have not yet been able to measure their variation. Accepting this assumption avoid to call for other universes. Instead, one universe, our own, would slowly drift across different regimes of the 'landscape' and the one we are now is just the one at a particular time.

The second and bolder idea, presented by Lee Smolin, is to see our present universe and its 'universal' constants not as a result of chance, but a result of natural section. The idea is to apply Darwin's ideas of selection and co-evolution to even the fundamental laws and constants. If true, the theory poses, as usual, new questions; for instance, is there a meta-law, like the second law of thermodynamic, that would dictate how laws evolve? Smolin concludes that if the theory, which can be falsifiable, come to be true

"Einstein and Darwin will be understood as partners in the greatest revolution yet in science, a revolution that taught us that the world in which we are embedded is nothing but an ever-evolving network of relationships."

Lee Smolin, Seeing Darwin in the light of Enstein;seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin, What is your dangerous idea?

The probabilistic basis of thought

McIntyre (2007) argues that the process of thought, biology tells us, is not deterministic as the Platonic ideal has taught us, but is rather the result of a probabilistic mental calculation wired into our brains:

"[A]t the most fundamental levels - and I mean fundamental biologically as well as mathematically - there is no such thing as deterministic thinking. Our very thought processes, including mathematically thought processes, are fundamentally and inherently probabilistic."

Biologically, the reason is the following:

"The ubiquitous protein molecules called allosteric enzymes are logic elements. But they interact in massively-parallel information-processing «circuits» whose very «wiring» is probabilistic, indeed stochastic. Brownian motion - thermal fluctuation on picosecond timescales - connects those logic elements together in a fundamentally noisy way."

McIntyre pursues by saying that

"That of course is why, given the mechanical strengths of chemical bonds including hydrogen bonds, life can exist only in a rather narrow temperature range."

Interesting.

How then, Platonic, perfect, optimal, symmetric ideas or geometry can result from such noisy thinking process? One answer for this question may come from some ideas put recently by Mumford (2000) and, posthumously by Jaynes (2003) in a recent book. Those ideas are that mathematical reasoning, among which probabilistic reasoning, can be proved to be the result of a well-posed probabilistic theory

"the very foundations of mathematics should be reformulated on a stochastic basis"

according to Mumford.

McIntyre goes on by showing that, starting with weak, self-consistent assumptions, the whole basis of probability theory can be deduced. He also insists on the "conditioning statements" that are systematically undermined in the classic teaching of probability. Those statements are the a priori knowledge available to the observer and that has to be taken into account in the calculation of the probability of an event. For example, the statement "some roads are closed by the rain" could be a conditioning statement to calculate what is the most probable course taken by a FedEx truck. It appears that the explicit and careful description of those statements are essential to make the probability theory cleared of any subjectivity. McIntyre goes so far to state that in the classic debate between "frequentists" and "Bayesians", although the former claim that they do not add any subjective knowledge to the probabilistic calculation, they actually do with the additive information being in their case often implicit and/or unconscious.

McIntyre finally explains that the nearly perfect shape observed in Nature, the aerodynamical shapes of a wing or a fish, the roundish shapes of trunk or flowers, are not the result of some innate knowledge of perfect, Platonic forms but is rather the result of an optimization problem based on statistical inference. Many visual examples exist that illustrates that our brain can indeed perform such statistical inference: the brain can for instance guess that a man is walking just by the knowledge of the motions of several points located on the man's body.

McIntyre concludes, maybe surprisingly reminiscent of some post-modernists, that the concept of an absolute truth is dangerous, behind which there is often or always some kind of implicit knowledge or information taken for granted and not put forward explicitly.

For more, see

Jaynes, E. T. (2003), Probability theory: The logic of science, edited by G. Larry Bretthorst, Cambridge, University Press, 727 pp.
McIntyre, M. E. (2007), On thinking probabilistically, Proceedings Hawaiian Winter Workshop, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 172 pp.
Mumford, D. (2000), The dawning of the age of stochasticity, in Mathematics: Frontiers and perspectives, edited by V. I. Arnol'd, M. Atiyah, P. Lax and, B. Mazur, Providence, RI, Amer. Math. Soc., 460 pp.

Surprising optimistic vision of progress by a poet

Poets and the like are usually rather pessimistic with respect to the course of civilisation and see the Machine as a dangerous agent that alienates humans. Not Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, poet and pilot at the beginning of the intercontinental airmail adventure, who sees the course of progress as an improvement where the Machine little by little is perfected and nearly disappears to the view of humans:

"La machine elle-même, plus elle se perfectionne, plus elle s'efface derrière son rôle. Il semble que tout l'effort industriel de l'homme, tous ses calculs, toutes ses nuits de veille sur les épures, n'aboutissent, comme signes visibles, qu'à la seule simplicité, comme s'il fallait l'expérience de plusieurs générations pour dégager peu à peu la courbe d'une colonne, d'une carène, ou d'un fuselage d'avion, jusqu'à leur rendre la pureté élémentaire de la courbe d'un sein ou d'une épaule. Il semble que le travail des ingénieurs, des dessinateurs, des calculateurs du bureau d'études ne soit ainsi en apparence, que de polir et d'effacer, d'alléger ce raccord, d'équilibrer cette aile, jusqu'à ce qu'on la remarque plus, jusqu'à qu'il n'y ait plus une aile acrrochée à un fuselage, mais une forme parfaitement épanouie, enfin dégagée de sa gangue, une sorte d'ensemble spontané, mystérieusement lié, et de la même qualité que celle du poème. Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. Au terme de son évolution, la machine se dissimule.

La perfection de l'invention confine ainsi à l'absence d'invention. Et, de même que, dans l'instrument, toute mécanique apparente s'est peu à peu effacée et qu'il nous est livré un objet aussi naturel qu'un galet poli par la mer, il est également admirable que, dans son usage même, la machine peu à peu se fasse oublier."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes, L'avion.

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.

Mechanism of Nature, less dogmatic after all

Jerry Fodor has written an interesting piece about some modifications concerning the theory of evolution in Nature ("Why pigs don't have wings"). Darwin's powerful idea that selective forces are the reason for what Nature is might not be as true as it first appears: some characteristics of individuals might just come for no specific reason or deep principle. Because even in the mechanism of Nature, life is also full of surprises and the road is just full of irrational bumps.

Paradoxically, that would make a lot of sense in many cases.