Laland’s Unfinished Opus

I’ve already made two somewhat dismissive references to Kevin Laland’s “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony – How Culture Made the Human Mind”(1). This is a review on completion of that read.

[Post Note: I see Massimo Pigliucci’s book club review of Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony came out a few days before I posted this. I need to read that and comment. Uniquely unique?]

I like it  in the sense that it does support the idea that the human mind is a qualitatively distinct and uniquely different kind in a world of many sentient species. It’s not exceptionalism in the sense that it couldn’t have been otherwise, that humans were in any sense necessarily predestined to be that species. But let’s face up to facts and responsibilities. Here we are.

I also like it in the sense that it compiles three or four decades of empirical scientific research into the evolution of intelligent life-hacks by which sentient beings copied and more generally learned individually, socially and by teaching one another. Rats, sticklebacks and corvids may indeed be highly intelligent in solving and communicating solutions to particular kinds of problems and the primates may indeed have evolved more general intelligence, but the runaway success of humanity (humanins) is inescapable (2). That has been the result of co-evolution of brain and culture – the many shared languages (3) by which knowledge and meta-knowledge are communicated and recorded beyond the minds and bodies of living individuals. For any other species to repeat or beat that, including any artificial non-biological species, they’d need to find a pretty comprehensive planet-sized niche in which to evolve free of the limitations of existing human occupation. Human lives are not a repeatable experiment so we ain’t gonna let that happen.

That ought to be enough to recommend Laland’s work as a read for anyone who doesn’t feel they already know this, or is actively in need scientific evidence to support that knowledge.

My problems are two-fold.

What did I learn? How much is actually new? I learned why as a child I never managed to catch a fifteen-spined stickleback despite catching many three-spined critters. Genuinely fascinating, and totally plausible with hindsight, given an understanding of how evolution works. I never knew that! But beyond that it felt mostly like statements of what already seemed obvious. What I’ve already read or otherwise considered as reality, Laland is expressing surprise at discovering. Is that me just virtue-signalling what I consider to be my own knowledge? I don’t think so, and this is why:

Laland gives plenty of generous credit to his own collaborators and students, but seems rather pointedly to ignore or dismiss those in parallel, or even competing, streams of research and thought. It seems tribal rather than genuinely collaborative to dismiss Dennett and Memes, particular since these feature in the popular best-seller lists of science and philosophy and this is Laland’s magnum foray into that space. My only “interest” in Dennett is to credit him as the writer from whom I feel I’ve already learned most of this stuff – with many of the same empirical examples, supported by several other writers. The real difference is that in talking about the copying and sharing of cultural information (and mental tools; meta-information, also culturally shared) Dennett and I use the language of memetics.

Frankly what’s in a word? If you’re telling the same – true – story, who cares? I agree with them both. It’s the same story. There is really only one exception, and for me it’s the reason why dismissing memes misses an important aspect of the ongoing story.

History is one thing. If we agree, only a pedant would be picky about the particular words. There are in fact plenty of other bio-cultural co-evolution and group-level selection ideas that will keep others concerned with the details of which empirical findings really do support which aspects of the story. As a good scientist, Laland himself leaves a few pointers to contentious points of detail. Plenty for the EES crowd to get their teeth into for many a year to come, biologically, psychologically and philosophically. For me the concern is how we get to the future from here and now.

Like many a public scientist, Laland is good with awe – “awe without wonder” in his case – in describing the greatest story ever told. It is indeed awesome, but no-one should be wondering how it came to be in any general sense. We know (4). “Many talented scientists have chipped away at this wonder”, before now, he says. Laland’s final chapter re-iterates the marvel that is this unique species we know as human mind. What he doesn’t appear to suggest – if he does I missed it – is any doubt that the direction of this awesome progress is in the direction of continued success. To my eyes, this is because he doesn’t make enough distinction between the many examples and mechanisms of human success in cultural co-evolution and the behaviour of the patterns of information involved in these – the memes – that take on a life of their own. The selfish meme anyone?

It’s probably a reflection of the time period summarised in the majority of Laland’s narrative. Decades ago few of us were actively concerned with fake-news and the spread of misinformation, or half-baked simplistic information taking hold of public consciousness. Within science, reduction to simple repeatable elements is the name of the game. Real life, human cultural evolution, including science as a sub-set of that, is more complicated. We are going to need a word for – a handle on – the contents of ideas (and their properties) being shared that is distinct from their embodiment in the brains and media exchanging them. Markets can go down – quantitatively and qualitatively – as well as up.

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(1) I resisted reading Laland’s work due to some of the preview / publicity in relation to some of my prejudices on the topic. I prefer to make my prejudices explicit upfront, rather than pretend they don’t exist. [Here] [and Here]. I gave in when I discovered “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony” was to be Massimo Pigliucci‘s next review in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis context, and I wanted to be forearmed in that dialogue. [Post Note: Was actually published 23rd Oct.]

(2) Success is more than headcount or % of the cosmos populated, because …

(3) Remember we’re considering the whole of human culture here, language is any natural, formal, narrative or artistic form symbolised in any medium.

(4) There is a bit of a fetish, reinforced by the ubiquity of media communications, that somehow we all have to know every detail of everything we care about and therefore everything must be transparent to everyone. This is a physical impossibility for a finite processor of information, and at some point we all have to accept trust in authority at some level. It doesn’t remove our right to question and dig a little deeper when appropriate; complementary to the positive fetish for information overload is the fashionably negative fetish against authority.

Marriage Mess

I’ve expressed concern that the Humanists UK campaign on “equal marriage” is misguided – addressing a real issue on secular freedoms, but proposing change that may have unintended consequences. Dropped my foot in it yesterday by questioning that in a conversation that @AndrewCopson was already having with @MoJGovUK on Twitter.

There are several religious and gender issues tangled-up in marriage law in the UK and in the separate English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish legislation. Make that religious, gender and nationalist tangles.

The UK Government advice is here. The Humanists UK position is here:

We have the basic anomaly that there are still legal differences: a “Civil Partnership” is not the same as a “Registry Wedding” irrespective of how the marriage is “celebrated” and for that reason (prohibited) hetero-sex civil partnerships cannot be the same in UK law as as same-sex partnerships. Hetero couples have less freedom than same sex! So far as I can see once the national differences are fixed, these can become synonymous. You have to ask how did we get into this mess?

Obviously we’re in this mess because historically the established CofE resisted changing the particular procreative purpose in weddings traditionally celebrated in the church, however much that has been relaxed between factions of the churches. But this has further consequences.

The underlying issue has been between the marriage recognised in law – in subsequent rights and responsibilities of the participants – and the nature of the wedding celebration. However few attend to support a wedding all marriages involve both elements, so that the witnessing of the oath is public. And whether the couple are biologically capable of conception or not, those rights and responsibilities extend to children, if any. Furthermore, that’s true whether or not one subscribes to the idea that the main purpose of a wedding is procreation, or simply the commitment between two (or more) individuals as a public entity.

The real problem is which “celebrants” carry the same legal status as registrars in accepting the oath legally, and therefore whether both need to be involved in the ceremony / celebration embodied in more than one person. That is the established church and other recognised churches have historically maintained and won that status for their celebrants. HUK seems to be petitioning for the same rights for our celebrants. That seems backwards to me, wanting the same recognition as a church celebrant in law.

There are of course several other anomalies in what can and can’t happen under the different wedding arrangements, but it seems to me that any wedding must meet the secular legal requirements, whether the institution performing the ceremony is a religious one or not. Basic secularism.

The advantage of this arrangement – keeping the legality and celebration separate – is that different institutions and different factions of different institutions(!) are still able to set their own rules for participation in their ceremony. A second advantage is that the default minimum civil ceremony, can itself evolve to include the most widely accepted set of civil values.

Tactically, I can understand an organisation like HUK fighting for the same privileges for its celebrants as an established church, but it’s not what we actually want to achieve is it? It’s not the first time HUK (BHA as was) has been criticised for behaving like a religious church, and that’s a separate argument.

So as I have said before, what am I missing beyond the tactical / strategic consistency?

Memes and Cultural Evolution

I was lucky enough to have a piece published in The New Humanist, ostensibly as a review of Dan Dennett’s “Bacteria to Bach and Back” (B2BnB), but majoring on the memetics of argumentation. The focus is Dennett’s bet that despite no longer spending his time arguing with his critics on their terms, his style of arguing for the reality of evolved consciousness will win the day against reductive denial. A new “species” of argument will evolve. I’ve summarised the following closing para in various retweets.:

Personally, I bought Dennett’s bet many years ago, and even some of his critics share the hunch that he is on the right side of history. The real work is for the rest of us to get to grips with what makes for a good argument, when the object is our understanding of how we argue ” with our minds. Our very rationality is at stake.

The New Humanist piece was restricted in length by the book-review template, but I will no doubt elaborate further on that thesis. At the same time, however, I’m about 1/3 of my way through Kevin Laland’s “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony”.

Very frustrating, but I’m sticking with it. Don’t get me wrong, Laland’s book is full of referenced evidence, not all of which I’ve seen before. If you haven’t, you should read it. For me it feels like a long statement of the obvious, that human minds – and the assortment of mental tools we share individually, socially and culturally – are co-evolved with our culture. It’s not that the ability to copy and share knowledge is distinctly human – just look at the rats and even the sticklebacks(!) – it’s our ability to preserve and maintain culture in media beyond the life of our brains and genes – intentionally, beyond Darwinism. Laland uses the word “wisdom” a little too liberally for culturally shared knowledge – the wisdom of shoals, if you like – even though he acknowledges the gaming element in selective copying of behaviour. For me wisdom is meta to that. Wisdom is understanding that we can choose creatively when to apply rules and acting on that understanding. It’s not simply the fact of choosing as part of nature’s selection processes. (Guidance of the wise, the enslavement of sticklebacks, etc.) But I digress.

The frustration is to ignore Dennett and to reject the word Meme. So far there is very little I couldn’t imagine Dennett writing or having written already, using the language of memetics and Darwinian design spaces. Laland is clearly also using information in the sense disembodied from its immediate physical media. Looks 99% common ground ahead to my eyes.

The most degenerate meme we suffer from is the one that says it’s good to prove wrong the guy you disagree with, rather than integrate common knowledge for all our benefit. We need a new species of argument.

The New Normal

We really need to be able to rehabilitate the word “normal” – in contrast to “abnormal” – in general dialogue. It doesn’t need to be normative, or pejorative of the abnormal, but being tolerant of alternatives and minorities, even extreme ones, must involve honesty about their true place in reality. Gender & sexuality, health physical, biological & mental, even cultural outlooks, values & behaviours, you name it. Valuing equality of human respect, rights & opportunities is one thing, but that’s not the same as assigning the same values to all variations in all contexts. That would be to deny value.

Just sayin’. This is probably just a stub for a longer conversation?

The Fate of Evil Genius?

There are so many points at which David Lavery’s sources on thinking and writing touch mine, that I need to remind myself that it might be no coincidence. I suspect I picked-up a lot of references from reading an on-line draft of his “Evil Genius” back in 2004, though I know a lot more about philosophy and the evolution of consciousness from the studies I’ve done since.

Since around 2010, his web-pages have carried this note:

The web version of Evil Genius has been removed from my website as I revise the text for possible publication as a book.

I discovered Lavery had died in 2016 by email from fellow researcher Henry Gurr in January this year, but I had forgotten until reminded by some unexpected David Lavery hits on my blog this week, so I did a little digging.

For most of the 21st Century, Lavery’s focus and success had been popular culture – Buffy, Sopranos, GoT and the like. Since his death, all Lavery’s earlier blog material – anything other than his Mid-Tennessee State Uni content – has gone completely off-line. Henry has a snapshot from earlier this year, and I’ve extracted all – fairly complete – off-line copies of Evil Genius entries I could find in the archive web.

Aside: As well as Robert Pirsig references and a major collection of Owen Barfield writings, Lavery, like Barfield, uses many Rudolf Steiner references. Steiner’s anthroposophy has a bad press in the UK thanks to Steiner schools that use a very prescriptive version of his ideas for their curriculum. It makes any references to Steiner potentially toxic despite any value in his actual thinking. There is nothing in Lavery – or Barfield for that matter – that is dependent on Steiner, he simply informed some of their thinking. In fact there are no Steiner references at all in the body of EG, and as many bibliographic items for Rudolf Steiner as there are for George Steiner – just one each – in that work. Almost all R Steiner references by Lavery are in his Barfield writings “Re-weaving the Rainbow” (which I have as a Kindle copy).

[Barfield is a whole other topic – see also Barfield on Psybertron –
and very influential for C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien and the rest of the Oxford Inklings. ]

EG is, as the cover suggests, a fantasy based on Kirkegaard’s heroine going back in time to “prevent” Descartes having his cogito ergo sum thought that might be seen as the root of the modern-day obsession with objectivity as something more fundamental than and distinct from human consciousness. Hence my interest. And a good deal more high-brow than popular culture.

As well as that fantastical plot device, EG was drafted very much as a blog-like project, a series of interlinked contemporary dated diary entries and notes by the various protagonists – in fact very like Pirsig’s early drafts of Zen and the Art compiled as a vast collection of index cards with meta-index linking cards. A blog before web-logging was invented.

I’ve given thought before to how such a work could be meaningfully published in readable form. So the question is, did Lavery take his draft EG any further before his death?

21st Century Economics – not before time?

After PostCapitalism (Paul Mason) [Take#2], numerous local discussions around the so-called Magic Money Tree and reasons to nevertheless control the money supply, and Javid falling into line this weekend on the idea of “supplying” money for public / affordable housing stock …. it’s all happening. We now have:

Preliminary steps toward a universal economic dynamics for monetary and fiscal policy
by Yaneer Bar-Yam, Jean Langlois-Meurinne, Mari Kawakatsu and Rodolfo Garcia
of New England Complex Systems Institute.
(About properly recognising the dynamics of complex systems – has both W Ross Ashby and Thomas Piketty (!) in the reference list. Hat tip to tweeted blog link – and own analysis – from Jaap van Till – The Connectivist. Wonder what Taleb makes of Bar-Yam paper?) (*)

Former minister, Baroness Shriti Vadera, who is now chairwoman of Santander UK, said that ‘the underlying promise of western capitalist economies […] has been broken‘ (Hat tip to Kenan Malik.)

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[(*) Post note: Retweeted the following today:

And took a look at @PrecPrinciple. Lo and behold along with Rupert Read, there are Nassim Taleb and Yaneer Bar-Yam. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?]

The Oxbridge Class Question – Institutional History

I and both my sons all got more than three A* A-level results. One got five A*s.

All three of us got through Cambridge selection process for interviews but all three failed to get final selection.

We’re all white male grammar school boys, taking advantage of 11-plus selection to (free) public education. (Father a surveyor / engineer, mother a teacher, in both generations, no-one in extended family with previous Oxbridge or even university education before me. Apart from that education, we’d consider the family northern working class … if asked.)

You don’t need to be ethnic or gender disadvantaged in order not to “fit in” at Oxbridge. And fitting-in is what it is about to succeed at Oxbridge. Once above a threshold, A-level results, and work-ethic predictions to achieve university grades are NOT the issue.

Not fitting-in I can admit was as much from myself as from any interviewers in my case. The historical stone and dark wood-panelling, the sense of institutional history are daunting aged 18. Preparation for interview needs to be much more than any explicit content of formal education, and specific “job” ambitions, matching courses to colleges. Call it “class” if you want, I don’t, but it is about maintaining and evolving institutional history – in the universities, the colleges and the “professions” – all establishment institutions.

Those are facts. Which aspects of that are good and bad for society, and which could be improved in the broadest sense, is a complex set of political issues beyond measurable individual and college attainment. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with A-level results or targets. More generally:

“When a measure becomes a target,
it ceases to be a good measure.”
Charles Goodhart

Personally, I don’t think fitting-in is about coming from that heritage, whatever your ethnic or class background it is possible to fit in. The question is about the individual appreciating what fitting-in means in terms of BOTH constraints and progressive opportunities for the individual and the institutions. Not sure words like posh or class help. It’s about attitudes to “establishment” in general.

It’s Irrational to be Too Rational

A significant part of my agenda is that what passes for received wisdom as “western rationality” is in fact degenerately irrational, damaging to humanity and the planet and as such, that received wisdom is a kind of collective “mental illness” of society. (The way we communicate and share truths and arguments is co-evolved with that psychological disorder, and the sheer pace and scale of 21st century communications is exacerbating the problem.)

It does mean that from time to time actual recognised mental disorders of individuals become topics of interest. Autism / Asperger’s being one candidate. Today the idea of Capgras Delusion being a form of reason where Bayesian analysis is in overdrive.

Capgras Delusion – is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor.

So, we have that link from Chris and a couple I Googled.

https://philpapers.org/rec/PARBMD

https://academic.oup.com/bjps/article-abstract/67/1/271/2473133/Bayesian-Models-Delusional-Beliefs-and-Epistemic

Being too-good at Bayesian reasoning. Love the (oft recurring) inference that too-rational = irrational (hence Autism, Brunsson etc.)

And, Evidentialism – fetishising evidence is also recurrent, though as IEP’s definition suggests and I’ve said before, the -ism itself is trivially “about” evidence, no actual thesis for it, it merely moves the question along to what “meaningfully” counts as evidence. (All evidence points back to Dennett’s “greedy reductionism”.)

Fascinating. I’ll be back!

Baggini’s Truthful Traits

Before getting into Laland’s daunting read (previous post), I broke off to read a little gem from Julian Baggini.

“A Short History of Truth” is 15000 words over 100 entertaining and readable pages. It is indeed a brief history of western philosophical ideas of truth topically related to the everyday frustrations we’ve come to know as post-truth.

A Short History of Truth : Consolations for a Post-Truth World, Hardback Book

Whether you’re new to the competing offerings of truth or you’ve already studied the concepts, Baggini creates a neat ontology of ten kinds of truth, which leads very conveniently to a simple recipe or checklist of ten traits we can all aspire to. This is not about defining truth, but about describing behaviours best suited to cultivating it.

In the words of the cover blurb:

These thought-provoking examinations reveal how the idea of truth has been used and abused over human history. Truth is complicated but Baggini leads us to a simple rubric for how we can all foster a better version of both ourselves and each other.

I loved it. Some of my favourite quotes – only one from the rubric – will give you a flavour.

There are no [alt-facts] just additional facts we may have missed.

Spiritual ‘truths’ should not compete with secular ones but should be seen as belonging to a different species.

[What] the Bush administration “misunderstimated”, was how important it was accurately to discern existing reality first if you intend to change it.

Science took a wrong turn because the wrong scientist held too much power.

Hallelujah! An unexpected pleasure.

Kevin Laland’s Unfinished Darwinian Business

I’m reading Kevin Laland’s “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony – How culture made the human mind“. There’s two reasons I’m reading it but firstly, the one reason I’m posting now before I’m very far into it.

Since all readings and reviews are prejudiced by prior understanding and expectations, I prefer to be honest up front what those are, so that they provide context for any later opinions I express on the actual reading.

Secondly, some review(s) I’d already seen, suggested Laland relegated memetics to irrelevance in a single passing footnote, whereas for me memetics is simply short-hand for cultural evolution. I wanted to be reading something that claimed to be an alternative to views I already hold.

Thirdly, because Massimo Pigliucci has advertised that it is the next book he is going to review, in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis context and I wanted to be forearmed.

So, let me confirm immediately, that meme / memetics has not a single mention in the index, and references to Dawkins, Blackmore and Dennett are simply single mentions each of The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype from the former and a single essay on Intentionality from the latter.

Given Laland claims this is the magnum opus of his 30 years study, and is promoted as a public science best-seller, it seems perverse to say the least, to not spend any time on addressing – explaining why he has no time for – the most popular and persistent metaphor in this domain. I understand, obviously, he has addressed this in earlier papers and writings, but not even a summary of his arguments in his latest. I need to find that single (non-indexed) footnote (*).

In my experience most arguments against memes are spurious straw-men, arguments against features not claimed by memetics. Not useful because they’re not objectively well-defined enough, and not the whole story. Just like genes, biologically, in fact. Since when did any complex story have a single silver bullet? So, let’s see:

For pinnacles of the human art we have the works of Puccini and Rachmaninoff “not evolving according to the laws of natural selection” in Chapter 1. Makes a change from the over-used Bach meme 😉

“If intelligence, language or the ability to construct elaborate artefacts [and musical arias] evolved in humans because they enhance the ability to survive and reproduce, then why didn’t other species acquire these capabilities?” he asks sceptically.

The first answer to the question why, is that clearly there is no good reason it couldn’t have, and still could if it weren’t that humans already have most of the resources sewn-up on planet Earth. Very hard to imagine enough isolation for a second strand of cultural mind to speciate now.

But the premise is also doubtful when we’re talking about cultural evolution – advantages are concerned with more than biological survival and reproduction. The existence and copying of memes is not limited to numbers of living bodies. Biologically it’s the genes (and epigenetics) that replicate. Culturally it’s memetics – cultural information patterns beyond physical biology.

Clearly human brain, mind and culture have co-evolved in cycles of self-reinforcement. Fitness and survival are about copies of the content. Mind having evolved, drivers – subconscious and intentional motivations – are many more than physical life and reproduction. You only have to think Maslow or Pink for what drives other patterns of human behaviour, other “rewards” in patterns and relationships – information, however embodied. I need to be looking out for information as a topic. I can see only one Turing reference, one mention of information and no mention of Shannon.

If all Laland is saying is that human mind and culture co-evolved, and once intentional mind evolved there are not only many drivers over and above physical survival, but also many non-Darwinian selection processes, then how and where is that remotely contentious. Sounds 100% Dennett to me. Laws of natural and intentional selection. Human intentionality is natural too.

Not looking too promising. Good news is that Brian Boyd is extensively referenced, someone whose work I liked. Boyd also provides a cover blurb:

Laland shows how culture – socially transmitted knowledge – is what made humans so successful as a species.

Isn’t that just a statement of the obvious? Isn’t it equally obvious that success is more than headcount and individual longevity, when we’re dealing with human culture?

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[Post Note: (*) That footnote on memetics isn’t a footnote it’s an end-note, one of the earliest notes in the first chapter.

Chap 1 Note (3) “In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins introduces the notion of the “meme”, a cultural replicator with gene-like properties. However the modern science of cultural evolution derives very little from memetics. For an introduction to the now extensive experimental and theoretical work that underpins this field, see Mesoudi (2011), Richerson and Boyd (2005), or Heinrich (2015). For a critical evaluation of the field see Lewens (2015).”

The actual reference in the text makes no mention of Dawkins or meme. I’m no fan of Dick the Dawk myself, he greatly over-reaches, but talk about mean-spirited!]