Darwin's Dangerous Idea

It is this misdirection that is mainly responsible for postponing the day when we can all live as comfortably with our new biological perspective as we do with the astronomical perspective Copernicus gave us.

There is no future in a sacred myth. Why not? Because of our curiosity. (…) Whatever we hold precious, we cannot protect it from our curiosity, because being who we are, one of the things we deem precious is the truth. Our love of truth is surely a central element in the meaning we find in our lives.

You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain.

“Though nature grants vast periods of time for the work of natural selection, she does not grant an indefinite period

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down

Life on Earth has been generated over billions of years in a single branching tree—the Tree of Life—by one algorithmic process or another.

Because most mathematical discussions of algorithms focus on their guaranteed or mathematically provable powers, people sometimes make the elementary mistake of thinking that a process that makes use of chance or randomness is not an algorithm. But even long division makes good use of randomness!

The good thing about long division is that it always works eventually, even if you are maximally stupid in making your first choice, in which case it just takes a little longer. Achieving success on hard tasks in spite of utter stupidity is what makes computers seem magical—how could something as mindless as a machine do something as smart as that?

calling a coin-toss is just a matter of luck, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the winner of such a tournament would do any better in international competition than somebody else who lost in an earlier round of the tournament. Chance has no memory.

Failing to appreciate the fact that chance has no memory is known as the Gambler’s Fallacy; it is surprisingly popular—so popular that I should probably stress that it is a fallacy, beyond any doubt or controversy.

Skill and luck intermingle naturally and inevitably in any real competition, but their ratios may vary widely. A tennis tournament played on very bumpy courts would raise the luck ratio (…) Skill, in contrast to luck, is projectable; in the same or similar circumstances, it can be counted on to give repeat performances.

But does a tournament—or any algorithm—have to do something interesting? No. The algorithms we tend to talk about almost always do something interesting—that’s why they attract our attention. But a procedure doesn’t fail to be an algorithm just because it is of no conceivable use or value to anyone. Consider a variation on the elimination-tournament algorithm in which the losers of the semi-finals play in the finals. This is a stupid rule, destroying the point of the whole tournament, but the tournament would still be an algorithm. Algorithms don’t have to have points or purposes.

Some algorithms do things so boringly irregular and pointless that there is no succinct way of saying what they are for. They just do what they do, and they do it every time.

Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us. “ “Evolution is not a process that was designed to produce us, but it does not follow from this that evolution is not an algorithmic process that has in fact produced us. “ LinkedIn: 12.02.2023 “Here, then, is Darwin’s dangerous idea: the algorithmic level is the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature. It is hard to believe that something as mindless and mechanical as an algorithm could produce such wonderful things.

Can it really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance? And if so, who designed that cascade? Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind, algorithmic process.

If Life is a Tree, it could all have arisen from an inexorable, automatic rebuilding process in which designs would accumulate over time.

if you don’t want to bite off more than you, can chew, the right bite to start with is often the finishing bite, if you can find it.

Darwin’s idea—bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

Time’s arrow given by Entropy—the loss of organization, or loss of temperature differences—is statistical and it is subject to local small-scale reversals. Most striking: life is a systematic reversal of Entropy, and intelligence creates structures and energy differences against the supposed gradual ‘death’ through Entropy of the physical Universe. [Gregory 1981, p. 136.]

A designed thing, then, is either a living thing or a part of a living thing, or the artifact of a living thing, organized in any case in aid of this battle against disorder.

So the fact that organisms—and computers and books and other artifacts—are effects of very special chains of causation is not, after Darwin, a merely reliable generalization, but a deep fact out of which to build a theory.

Each step has been accomplished by brute, mechanical, algorithmic climbing, from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing.

Evolution cannot see way down the road, so anything it builds must have an immediate payoff to counterbalance the cost.

The phenotype is the eventual body design created by the genotype in interaction with environment.

greedy reductionists think that everything can be explained without cranes; good reductionists think that everything can be explained without skyhooks.

“Are you so in love with Truth at all costs that you would want to know if your lover were unfaithful to you?

Darwin’s dangerous idea is that Design can emerge from mere Order via an algorithmic process that makes no use of pre-existing Mind.

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.

Could anything happen other than what actually happens? This dread hypothesis, the idea that only the actual is possible, has been called actualism (Ayers 1968).

No man is an island, John Donne proclaims, and Charles Darwin adds that neither is any clam or tulip—every possible living thing is connected by isthmuses of descent to all other living things.

In a Vast space of possibilities, the odds of a similarity between two independently chosen elements is Vanishing unless there is a reason.

Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side.

So isn’t it a wonderful fact that the laws are just right for us to exist? Indeed, one might want to add, we almost didn’t make it!

In the “weak form,

Life Physics: For each cell in the grid, count how many of its eight neighbors are ON at the present instant. If the answer is exactly two, the cell stays in its present state (ON or OFF) in the next instant. If the answer is exactly three, the cell is ON in the next instant whatever its current state. Under all other conditions, the cell is OFF.

At the physical level there is no motion, just ON and OFF, and the only individual things that exist, cells, are defined by their fixed spatial location.

self-replicators don’t just fall together in cosmic coincidences; they are too large and expensive.

Some of the things in the Life world are just more marvelous and unanticipated (by us, with our puny intellects) than others.

That there has been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes), and the world we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have existed through eternity.

Hume imputes the “continued improvement

stupid mechanic,

The basic idea is that the singularities known as black holes are in effect the birthplaces of offspring universes, in which the fundamental physical constants would differ slightly, in random ways, from the physical constants in the parent universe.

(I advise my philosophy students to develop hypersensitivity for rhetorical questions in philosophy. They paper over whatever cracks there are in the arguments.)

In fact, if you shuffle through all the possibilities for eternity, you will pass through each possible place in these Vast (but finite) spaces not just once but an infinity of times! (…) Each possible setting is tried an infinity of times, and so every variation on every theme, both those that “make sense

Anybody who won a coin-tossing tournament would be tempted to think he was blessed with magical powers, especially if he had no direct knowledge of the other players. (…) The winner doesn’t see that the situation was structured so that somebody simply had to be the lucky one—and he just happened to be it.

Give me Order, and time, and I will explain Design.

Nietzsche viewed his argument for eternal recurrence as a proof of the absurdity or meaninglessness of life, a proof that no meaning was given to the universe from on high.

But what if the meaning is somehow the creation of the individuals themselves, arising anew in each incarnation rather than as a gift from on high? This might open up the possibility of meaning that was not threatened by repetition. This is the defining theme of existentialism in its various species: the only meaning there can be is the meaning you (somehow) create for yourself. (…) … everything else that we treasure, gradually evolves from nothingness.

The wonderful particularity or individuality of the creation was due, not to Shakespearean inventive genius, but to the incessant contributions of chance, a growing sequence of what Crick (1968) has called “frozen accidents.

That is indeed a thing of beauty, as mathematicians are forever exclaiming, but it is not itself something intelligent but, wonder of wonders, something intelligible. Being abstract and outside of time, it is nothing with an initiation or origin in need of explanation. What does need its origin explained is the concrete universe itself, and as Hume’s Philo long ago asked: Why not stop at the material world? It, we have seen, does perform a version of the ultimate bootstrapping trick; it creates itself ex nihilo, or at any rate out of something that is well-nigh indistinguishable from nothing at all. “ “Thus, out of next to nothing, the world we know and love created itself.

There are important differences, however, between the products of human engineering and the products of evolution, because of differences in the processes that create them.

Nietzsche seems to think that this life will happen again not because it and all possible variations on it will happen over and over, but because there is only one possible variation—this one—and it will happen over and over. Nietzsche, in short, seems to have believed in actualism.

The Local Rule is fundamental to Darwinism; it is equivalent to the requirement that there cannot be any intelligent (or “far-seeing

It is fitting to observe, then, that this important work is an instance of Darwinism triumphant, reductionism triumphant, mechanism triumphant, materialism triumphant. It is also, however, the farthest thing from greedy reductionism. It is a breathtaking cascade of levels upon levels upon levels, with new principles of explanation, new phenomena appearing at each level, forever revealing that the fond hope of explaining “everything

“Selection is more like a particularly subtle demon that has operated on the different steps up to life, and operates today at the different levels of life, with a set of highly original tricks. Above all, it is highly active, driven by an internal feedback mechanism that searches in a very discriminating manner for the best route to optimal performance, not because it possesses an inherent drive towards any predestined goal, but simply by virtue of its inherent non-linear mechanism, which gives the appearance of goal-directedness. [Eigen 1992, p. 123.]

The road to wisdom?Well, it’s plain and simple to express:Err and err and err againbut less and less and less.

We know as a matter of logic that there was at least one start that has us as its continuation, but there were probably many false starts that differed in no interesting way at all from the one that initiated the winning series.

Darwin show’s that evolution does not need what we need; the real world can get along just fine with the de facto divergences that emerge over time, leaving lots of emptiness between clusters of actuality. “Right from the beginning, the cost of doing something is running the risk of doing it wrong, of making a mistake. Our slogan could be: No taking without mistaking.

…meaning and mind can never be pulled apart, that there could never be meaning where there was no mind, or mind where there was no meaning.

Only some things in the universe manifest intentionality. A book or a painting can be about a mountain, but a mountain itself is not about anything. A map or a sign or a dream or a song can be about Paris, but Paris is not about anything. Intentionality is widely regarded by philosophers as the, mark of the mental. Where does intentionality come from? It comes from minds, of course.

Locke took himself to be proving deductively what the tradition already took to be obvious: original intentionality springs from the Mind of God; we are God’s creatures, and derive our intentionality from Him. Darwin turned this doctrine upside down: intentionality doesn’t come from on high; it percolates up from below, from the initially mindless and pointless algorithmic processes that gradually acquire meaning and intelligence as they develop.

Before intentionality can be fully fledged, it must go through its awkward, ugly period of featherless pseudo-intentionality. The synchronic path is the path of Artificial Intelligence: in an organism with genuine intentionality—such as yourself—there are, right now, many parts, and some of these parts exhibit a sort of semi-intentionality, or mere as if intentionality, or pseudo-intentionality— call it what you like—and your own genuine, fully fledged intentionality is in fact the product (with no further miracle ingredients) of the activities of all the semi-minded and mindless bits that make you up (this is the central thesis defended in Dennett 1987b, 1991a). That is what a mind is— not a miraclemachine, but a huge, semi-designed, self-redesigning amalgam of smaller machines, each with its own design history, each playing its own role in the “economy of the soul.

Can it be that if you put enough of these dumb homunculi together you make a real conscious person? The Darwinian says there could be no other way of making one. Now, it certainly does not follow from the fact that you are descended from robots that you are a robot. After all, you are also a direct descendant of some fish, and you are not a fish; you are a direct descendant of some bacteria, and you are not a bacterium. But unless dualism or vitalism is true (in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you), you are made of robots—or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecular machines. And all of these are ultimately descended from the original macros. So something made of robots can exhibit genuine consciousness, or genuine intentionality, because you do if anything does.

Heuristic algorithms are, like all algorithms, mechanical procedures that are guaranteed to do what they do, but what they do is engage in risky search!

Look before you leap, of course, and learn from your mistakes, so the system should have a memory in which to store past experience.

I can produce somebody who wins ten consecutive coin-tosses without a loss. I don’t know in advance who that somebody is going to be; I just know that the mantle will pass—has to pass, as a matter of algorithmic necessity—to somebody or other so long as I execute the algorithm. If you overlook this possibility and take my sucker bet, it is because you are too used to the human practice of tracking individuals and building projects around identified individuals and their future prospects. And if the winner of the tournament thinks there has to be an explanation of why he won, he is mistaken: there is no reason at all why he won; there is only a very good reason why somebody won.

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! What a royal lineage of winners you come from!

The process of evolution is notoriously lacking in foresight. Since it has no foresight at all, unforeseen or unforeseeable side effects are nothing to it; it proceeds, unlike human engineers, via the profligate process of creating vast numbers of relatively uninsulated designs, most of which are hopelessly flawed because of self-defeating side effects, but a few of which, by dumb luck, are spared that ignominious fate.

Adaptive evolution is a search process—driven by mutation, recombination, and selection—on fixed or deforming fitness landscapes.

The tinker, says Levi-Strauss, is willing to be guided by the nature of the material, whereas the engineer wants the material to be perfectly malleable— like the concrete so beloved by the Bauhaus architects. So the tinker is a deep thinker after all, complying with constraints, not fighting them. The truly wise engineer works not contra naturam but secundum naturam.

Reverse engineering insists that wherever there is a highly particular lock, there must be a highly particular key to fit it." “…natural selection works on genes distributed over many individuals and over many millions of years, human actuarial intuitions are over-ruled.

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl.

Adaptationists are masters of the retrospective rationale, like the chess-player who only notices after he’s made the move that it forces checkmate in two moves.

Every participant can determine the variables which describe his own actions but not those of the others. Nevertheless those ‘alien’ variables cannot, from his point of view, be described by statistical assumptions.

…you have knowledge of the hidden constraints, and foresight. Mother Nature does not. Mother Nature has no reason to avoid high-risk gambits; she takes them all, and shrugs when most of them lose.

Adaptationism is both ubiquitous and powerful in biology. Like any other idea, it can be misused, but it is not a mistaken idea; it is in fact the irreplaceable core of Darwinian thinking. Gould and Lewontin’s fabled refutation of adaptationism is an illusion, but they have raised everybody’s consciousness about the risks of incautious thinking. Good adaptationistic thinking is always on the lookout for hidden constraints, and in fact is the best method for uncovering them.

Gould, like eminent evolutionary thinkers before him, has been searching for skyhooks to limit the power of Darwin’s dangerous idea.

One cannot spend a lifetime working on evolutionary theory without becoming aware that most people who do not work in the field, and some who do, have a strong wish to believe that the Darwinian theory is false.

…progress in science often demands the recovery of ancient truths and their rendering in novel ways

For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not evolution at all.

…don’t think that evolution makes adjustments in existing lineages; evolution throws away whole lineages, and lets other, different, lineages prosper.

... Gambler’s Fallacy of supposing that after it happened once, the odds rose against its happening again.

The first rules of memes, as for genes, is that replication is not necessarily for the good of anything; replicators flourish that are good at . . . replicating—for whatever reason!

…the Tower of Generate-and-Test; as each new floor of the Tower gets constructed, it empowers the organisms at that level to find better and better moves, and find them more efficiently.

The imitative actions we share with some higher animals may show the benefits of information gathered not just by our ancestors, but also by our social groups over generations, transmitted nongenetically by a “tradition

When comparing the time scales of genetic and cultural evolution, it is useful to bear in mind that we today—every one of us—can easily understand many ideas that were simply unthinkable by the geniuses in our grandparents’ generation!

Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections.

Comparing our brains anatomically with chimpanzee brains (or dolphin brains or any other non-human brains) would be almost beside the point, because our brains are in effect joined together into a single cognitive system that dwarfs all others. They are joined by an innovation that has invaded our brains and no others: language. I am not making the foolish claim that all our brains are knit together by language into one gigantic mind, thinking its transnational thoughts, but, rather, that each individual human brain,. thanks to its communicative links, is the beneficiary of the cognitive labors of the others in a way that gives it unprecedented powers.

The human mind is an amazing crane, and there is a lot of design work that has to have been done to build it, and to keep it working and up-to-date now.“ “Before there were words, there were no word meanings, even if there were other sorts of meanings.

Mother Nature has never aspired to absolute certainty; a good risk is enough for her.

If the mind is an algorithm (contrary to Penrose’s claim), surely it is not an algorithm that is recognizable to, or accessible to, those whose minds it creates.

Individual styles are truly unique, the product of untold billions of serendipitous encounters over the ages, encounters that produced first a unique genome, and then a unique upbringing, and finally a unique set of life experiences.

“there is no checkmate in life, no point at which we get a definitive result, positive or negative, from which we can calculate, by retrograde analysis, the actual values of the alternatives that lay along the path taken.

Ethical decision-making, examined from the perspective of Darwin’s dangerous idea, holds out scant hope of our ever discovering a formula or an algorithm for doing right. But that is not an occasion for despair; we have the mind-tools we need to design and redesign ourselves, ever searching for better solutions to the problems we create for ourselves and others.

The genius exhibited by Mother Nature can be disassembled into many acts of micro-genius—myopic or blind, purposeless but capable of the most minimal sort of recognition of a good (a better) thing.

Bach is precious not because he had within his brain a magic pearl of geniusstuff, a skyhook, but because he was, or contained, an utterly idiosyncratic structure of cranes, made of cranes, made of cranes, made of cranes.

There is no “natural

Which is worse, taking “heroic

Ignorance is a necessary condition for many excellent things. The childish joy of seeing what Santa Claus has brought for Christmas is a species of joy that must soon be extinguished in each child by the loss of ignorance. When that child grows up, she can transmit that joy to her own children, but she must also recognize a time when it has outlived its value. “I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.

Misinforming a child is a terrible offense. A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes.

We preach freedom of religion, but only so far. If your religion advocates slavery, or mutilation of women, or infanticide, or puts a price on Salman Rushdie’s head because he has insulted it, then your religion has a feature that cannot be respected. It endangers us all. It is nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no longer a menace; we can peacefully coexist, with a little wisdom. The same policy can be discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom.

Long before there was science, or even philosophy, there were religions. They have served many purposes (it would be a mistake of greedy reductionism to look for a single purpose, a single summum bonum which they have all directly or indirectly served). They have inspired many people to lead lives that have added immeasurably to the wonders of our world, and they have inspired many more people to lead lives that were, given their circumstances, more meaningful, less painful, than they otherwise could have been.

That is our world, and the suffering in it matters, if anything does. Religions have brought the comfort of belonging and companionship to many who would otherwise have passed through this life all alone, without glory or adventure. At their best, religions have drawn attention to love, and made it real for people who could not otherwise see it, and ennobled the attitudes and refreshed the spirits of the world-beset. Another thing religions have accomplished, without this being thereby their raison d’être, is that they have kept Homo sapiens civilized enough, for long enough, for us to have learned how to reflect more systematically and accurately on our position in the universe.

We must not underestimate the suffering such confrontations cause. To watch, to have to participate in, the contraction or evaporation of beloved features of one’s heritage is a pain only our species can experience, and surely few pains could be more terrible. But we have no reasonable alternative, and those whose visions dictate that they cannot peacefully coexist with the rest of us we will have to quarantine as best we can, minimizing the pain and damage, trying always to leave open a path or two that may come to seem acceptable. If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God’s rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods—that the Earth is flat, that “Man

Our people, it says, benefit more from having a place of splendor in which to worship than from a little more food. Any atheist or agnostic who finds this cost-benefit analysis ludicrous might pause to consider whether to support diverting all charitable and governmental support for museums, symphony orchestras, libraries, and scientific laboratories to efforts to provide more food and better living conditions for the least well off. A human life worth living is not something that can be uncontroversially measured, and that is its glory.

What is design work? It is that wonderful wedding of chance and necessity, happening in a trillion places at once, at a trillion different levels. And what miracle caused it? None. It just happened to happen, in the fullness of time. You could even say, in a way, that the Tree of Life created itself. Not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly, over billions of years. Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s “Being greater than which nothing can be conceived,

The only way of avoiding the mistakes is to learn from the mistakes we have already made.