Friday, 27 August 2010

The Newest Strongest?

I regularly read The New York Times's column "The Stone", which features articles by leading philosophers; this week, the guest author was Susan Blackmore, whose work I've been following for some years now. I wanted to blog on "The Third Replicator" (Blackmore, 2010) for several reasons: it's by Blackmore, which attracted me in the first place; it's an unashamedly academic piece of writing for you to enjoy, with sources cited throughout, a list of references at the end, which is not usual for articles in The New York Times, and with a consistently academic writing style, which is not surprising given the author; finally, I think it also ties in neatly with the argument that Math has put forward to oppose Stephen Law's thesis that eating meat it immoral.

In her article, Blackmore presents a further development of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins's meme theory, which, as she notes, Dawkins first suggested in his 1976 classic The Selfish Gene, and which has since had a pretty rough life, as Blackmore explains. Blackmore has long supported the meme theory evolution of Darwin's theory of evolution, and in "The Third Replicator", she extends this by arguing that the rise of the internet and our interconnected and increasingly independent machines has given rise to a whole new class of things that can be replicated just as genes have been for billions of years, followed by memes once our ancestors' brains became complex enough to enable such replication. Blackmore argues that genes and memes have now been joined, are now being joined, by temes and teme machines, which are the machine equivalents of genes and  the bodies, animal, plant or bacterial, that are the tools that genes build to copy themselves.

One thing I liked in Blackmore's discussion is that she very forcefully restates Dawkin's point that it is not animals and plants that are in control of and driving evolution on this planet, but the genes that build every living thing, including us, in order to ensure the gene's accurate copying and continued existence. Blackmore also manages to work in the ideas of Daniel Dennett, whose 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which she also cites, is perhaps the clearest and most thorough account of how deeply evolutionary theory explains every thing connected  with life on this planet, from carrots to Mozart symphonies, from the AIDs virus to religion. But what I really wanted to comment on was the idea that there is something special about the survival of the fittest. First, the things that survive are never particular living things, such as a carrot or a person, but always and only the genes within. It's the genes that are competing with each other that drive evolution: the genes that build the best bodies, plant or animal, are the ones that win the reproduction race, and that does not necessarily require having the "strongest" body, unless the word strongest is defined to mean "best suited to allowing genes to reproduce", which is a bit circular.

Over millions of years, genes built ever more varied and complex bodies to further their reproduction, all perfectly mindlessly. Along the way, they created multi-celled organisms, then sex (first in plants), then eyes and other senses, and then large brains, which eventually became capable of the sort of abstract reasoning that characterizes humans, and that no other animal is nearly as good at, although our machines (those temes, as Blackmore labels them) may be catching up fast. Those brains made possible knowledge, the recording of knowledge, and critical reasoning. Those same brains made possible emotions, which, like everything else, served an evolutionary survival purpose, and our brains are also capable of moral reflection, assessment and decision making, as much as they are of pursuing knowledge and power. Indeed, the ever increasing evidence is that we are programmed to be moral machines as much as we are programmed to think, learn languages and feel love in the mindless efforts of genes to create ever fitter (stronger) bodies to reproduce themselves, which is where I think Blackmore's article connects us with Math's opposing argument to Stephen Law, so I'll leave off here, and leave you carry on these related discussions.
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References
Blackmore, S. (2010, August 22). The third replicator. The New York Times. Retrieved August 27, 2010 from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/the-third-replicator/?emc=eta1

3 comments:

  1. Peter,
    First comment from me is this writing is very high level I can't understand it all, sorry.
    From what I understand, you suggest that the reason of survival is fitter not stronger, right? The thing that play important role is genes and memes, something that used to transmit the knowledge and moral to the others; and humans have the "best" genes that make more complex, am I right?
    If you mean something like what I just wrote, there is an interesting argument in my favorite movie, the Matrix, that humans are not mammal anymore, we will become one type of viruses because humans are not adapted ourselves to environment but we convert the environment to suit us, and that is a habit of viruses. In the Matrix, humans will be used as batteries for super computer that "strong" enough to conquer the world.

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  2. Math,
    The one thing that did make me hesitate for a few days before blogging Blackmore's article is that it is very difficult - as I noted, she is an academic, and writes like one all the time, even when she's relaxing with an article for the mass media. In the end, it was because of the connection I saw with your ideas that finally decided me to write that post.

    I also loved The Matrix films, especially the first two (the 3rd seemed to me to lose the plot a bit). The films raise a number of very provocative comments about what it is to be a human and a person, and the scene where Smith explains his virus theory to the bound Morpheus does seem to me to say pretty much what you've understood. And they were great entertainment.

    On another note, the whole idea of brains controlled by super-computers was also stolen from philosophers: the immediate source was Hilary Putnam, who describes "a brain in a vat" in his Reason, Truth, and History (1981), and he was merely updating an idea that goes all the way back to Plato.

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  3. The "brain in a vat" seems to me a good example of a successful (fit / strong) meme - it's managed to get itself replicated very efficiently as it evolves in hopping from brain to brain. First in books for philosophers, then lectures, thence to more popular culture, and finally in extremely popular films. And now it's loose on the internet.

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