Dear Bob,
As you probably feared, my first questions addressed the final chapters, which you tagged as the most speculative. I’ll follow up briefly, but then toss out some observations on the heart of the book, the causes of organic and human history. Obviously you can’t reply to or comment on everything.
1. One criterion for distinguishing the “goal” of a feedback system from its byproducts is how directly and specifically its effector mechanisms bring about the supposed goal. A thermostat can be said to have the goal of regulating temperature rather than helping house plants grow, because it is wired to a heater (which affects temperature directly), and because if the plants droop despite the thermostat’s effects, the thermostat is not equipped with an alternative mechanism that helps the plants (such as a dispenser of water or fertilizer). But by this criterion it’s hard to describe natural selection–whose immediate effector is merely differential replication–as having the “goal” of producing a biosphere or a human brain. It does produce them, of course, more as byproducts, I would think.
In a similar vein: I agree that the human brain is more interesting and consequential than the elephant trunk, but if natural selection were (metaphorically speaking) intent on building that brain, or something like it, why did it bother with so many side projects–trunks and snail shells and acorns and all the rest? We both know the (no-doubt apocryphal) story in which J.B.S. Haldane was asked by an interviewer what a lifetime of studying the living world had revealed about our Creator, and he replied “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
2. The Internet is in some ways like a brain, but in important ways not. The brain doesn’t just let information ricochet around the skull. It is organized to do something: to move the muscles in ways that allow the whole body to attain the goals set by the emotions. The anatomy of the brain reflects that: It is not a uniform web or net, but has a specific organization in which emotional circuits interconnect with the frontal lobes, which receive information from perceptual systems and send commands to the motor system. This goal-directed organization comes from an important property of organisms you discuss: Their cells are in the same reproductive boat, and thus have no “incentive” to act against the interests of the whole body. But the Internet, not being a cohesive replicating system, has no such organization, and, I would think, no goal or direction.
3. I share your guarded optimism about moral progress–Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong. An anthropologist once told me, “Every day I thank God He did not make me a Yanomamo warrior.” (And he is an atheist.) I am less sure that such progress is preordained or “in the cards” to a greater extent than any other development we now enjoy, such as, say, bigger and faster cars.
4. Back to the core of the book. One original and significant claim is that humans are not so much adapted to a particular cultural and technological lifestyle as they are adapted to improving on whatever lifestyle they were born into. This focus on the technological and social talents of our brain may help resolve two archeological puzzles.
One is why fossils of anatomically modern Homo sapiens are not perfectly associated with the fancy tools and art of the Upper Paleolithic (as I described it in How the Mind Works, all previous hominids came out of the comic strip “B.C.,” but the Upper Paleolithic people were the Flintstones.) As opposed to the conventional view, in which some cultural cataclysm arrived out of the blue like an asteroid 30,000 years ago, you (I think) would say that as soon as our species appeared, it set to work at becoming the Flintstones–but Bedrock wasn’t built in a day.
The other puzzle is how our emotional makeup–including deadly sins such as greed, pride, and envy–could have evolved in the seemingly egalitarian lifestyle of hunter-gatherer ancestors, since those emotions seem better adapted to the acquisitive lifestyles of evolutionarily recent sedentary civilizations. I had always known that today’s hunter-gatherers are probably unrepresentative of our ancestors, because they live on land that no one else wants. But your portrayal of those ancestors as continuously experimenting (and often succeeding) at attaining a more flush lifestyle (rather than going from hunting and gathering to agriculture in one giant leap for mankind) helps resolve the discrepancy, if I interpret you correctly.
Best wishes,
Steve
