Category Archives: Science in general

Thoughts on the evolution of technology-using intelligence

Posted on by
1

A few more thoughts inspired by Tim Maudlin's remarks in an interview with the Atlantic magazine. I'll quote Tim again first:

The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.

Certainly it is remarkable that only one technology-using (if you discount a few cases of the most rudimentary use of natural objects, and perhaps a few cases of very rudimentarily modified objects, as tools by other animals) species has evolved on Earth. An interesting question is whether most planets that do evolve life eventually evolve species that produce and use complex technology, and how many such species. My guess, certainly not supported by long consideration, but by a modest amount of offhand thought, is that given enough time, they do. My guess is also that it takes a fair amount of time for evolution to produce such a species, and that this is part of an overall evolution towards increasing complexity, in some sense I'll here leave ill-defined, of the overall web of life on the planet, and in particular, of the most complex species on the planet. (Perhaps the notions of complexity explored by Charles Bennett, Murray Gell-Mann, and Seth Lloyd may be relevant.) Since the environment in which organisms must survive and propagate evolution consists in significant measure of other organisms, evolution itself creates new niches in this environment for organisms to evolve toward filling. As Robinson Jeffers wrote:

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?

While I don't see a clear and obvious argument for it offhand, it is plausible to me that this process tends over time to create more and more complexity. In this sense, I suspect there is "progress" in evolution, despite a fair amount of scoffing in some quarters at the notion of evolutionary progress. This looks like a fruitful area for research. It's also plausible that this sort of evolutionary progress may eventually create both a niche for, and an accessible evolutionary path towards, a technology-using intelligent species. Whether the fact that we have only a single such species on this planet is due primarily to their being essentially only one niche for such a species, to the fact that it takes a long time for such a species to evolve due to the many precursor steps necessary (this would need to be a rather tricky anthropic argument, I suspect), or just happenstance, seems even more speculative, but very interesting.

So it seems to me I find myself supporting, at least speculatively, what may seem the naive, knee-jerk view "that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward". With allowance for a metaphorical use of "striving", and modification of the definite article ("the thing"), I'm not too unhappy with that characterization. How far things go beyond "the intelligence we have", though, I'm not prepared to say. And it may be that there are very different paths for a planetary ecosystem to take, other than the production of one (or a few?) technology-using species. As Tim says, in the end we really don't know. But I do think there is interesting knowledge to be sought here.

Tim Maudlin on the training of physicists, the evolution of intelligence, and more

Posted on by
1

I had to link this interview with philosopher Tim Maudlin, in the Atlantic, when I read his observation that "The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore." But there's a lot more of interest in the interview as well. I found the article via Andrew Sullivan's blog; Sullivan found Tim's thoughts on the evolution of intelligence to be particularly interesting:

What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.

Indeed there is, but it points out some very interesting questions: is there a tendency, given enough time, for a species intelligent enough to produce technology to arise on an earth-like planet? Is there, perhaps, a tendency for it to inhibit the evolution of other such species? My personal guess (and it's just that, a guess, not supported by careful thought) is that there is such a tendency, but it takes a lot of time, it builds on, and is part of, a slow increase in the complexity of the most complex organisms. This is, of course, probably the "knee-jerk" view. Whether it inhibits the evolution of other species is something I'm less willing to speculate on (though if Neanderthals were another such species, we may have some evidence (one case!) for inhibition of the branching of a potentially technologically-capable intelligent species into two such species). Whether vertebrates have characteristics making it more likely for them to evolve technologically-capable intelligence than it is for, say, insects to evolve it is another interesting question.

Bill in Congress would prevent NIH from providing open access to taxpayer-funded research

Posted on by
Reply

NIH has long required its grantees to provide open access to all articles produced using its funding.  Now, as described in this New York Times editorial, there's a bill in Congress that would kill this open access policy.  Offhand, I don't agree with the writer's suggestion that the principle should be "if taxpayers paid for it, they own it", in the sense suggested in the next sentence, that all work produced with government funding should be excluded from copyright.  But I do believe there should be open access to government-funded research.

 

 

Smash (well, hope the U.K. has the good sense to radically revise) the British libel laws!

Posted on by
2

I wasn't planning another post in the "Smash" series for awhile, but this just had to be titled so.  When I followed this up from Matt Leifer's site, I just had to draw attention to it.   British science writer Simon Singh is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic association for calling some of their treatments bogus.  Part of a broader problem of British libel laws chilling free speech, including discussion of so-called Islamist extremism in Britain, as discussed in this Daily Mail article.  More links at "sense about science".  Matt's post is from last August, so hopefully something strong has been done about this by now; I'll have to look into it.  This could seriously damage Britain if something isn't done about it.

2005 Winner's Tank Shiraz, Langhorne Creek, Australia... and the Future of Science

Posted on by
Reply

I've mentioned before how fantastic the 2005 Aussie Shirazes are, especially from the Barossa valley and McClaren Vale (e.g. The Maverick).  Here's a review of the wine that got me started on them, in the form of an email I send to Michael Nielsen a few  years back, when I first tasted this wine.  The 2006 was also good, but like many of the '06 Australians, less balanced and suave, and a bit thinner and sharper, than the the '05 incarnation.  I've added a few links.   Maybe soon I'll post more on the '05 and '06 Shirazes from Oz.

Hi Michael---

I opened a wine tonight that in several ways reminded me of you.  So I'm suggesting you try a bottle
or six before you depart your native land for the greener (?), but certainly colder (except in the summer when you'll be sweating buckets) pastures of Ontario.  It's "The Winner's Tank" 2005 Aussie Shiraz, Langhorne Creek.  I was dubious about this puppy because its label is a photo of some big square concrete tank in the middle of pasture, behind a barbed-wire fence, with "Hawks '05" inscribed, along with some shtick about how the local tradition is for the winners of the annual Aussie Rules football tournament to gather in the vineyard and paint their names on the tank.

Label:

Label:

Clearly just a bunch of hooey from some canny Aussie businessmen-winemakers to sucker some of us ever-gullible yanks into spending twelve bucks on a bottle---to be consumed, no doubt, with the shrimp we've got going on our barbie.  But having allowed myself to be suckered into it by a salesman at the Santa Fe Cost Plus---or else at Kokoman, our local Pojoaque-pueblo based purveyor of cheap beer to the masses and expensive Bordeaux to the Santa Fe/Los Alamos crowd--I opened it tonight.  Well, it was excellent.  Probably shouldn't talk it up too much for that promotes disappointment (it's just wine, for crissake) but, what the heck.  One of the better wines I've ever had---starting out kind of velvety, and also fruity  but not with the enjoyable but somewhat tacky blueberries-'n-bubble-gum taste of some of the cheaper-but-still-decent Australian shirazes.  Nope, this also had a hint of darkness, maybe even veering towards an off-taste, rubbery or rotty but opening out with air into a kind of stony complexity you get with the best Rhone Valley syrahs of France (or one I had from the Santa Barbara area).  Of course the 15.5 percent alcohol could be influencing my perceptions too.  (But more often it's hard for the flavors to stand up to that alcohol level.)

Anyway, recalling the tasty bottle of Jacob's Creek Cabernet you once bought me for my birthday, or my dissertation submission or wedding or something, and the fact that you're probably the first person I ever heard about Aussie Rules football from, I thought you might enjoy this recommendation, that is if you indulge in wine on occasion.

Sorry I cheesed out on QIP this year... I can't recall if it's because of some confusion about abstract submission and the international date line, or just not getting my paperwork in at LANL with the ever-lengthing lead time required.  Possibly I was even doing some research at the time I needed to be paying attention to registration or paperwork.  I got into the staying-up-late-at-night-trying-to-prove-stuff mode about extending the no-broadcasting theorem to a general ordered vector spaces context, with Jon Barrett, Matt Leifer, and Alex Wilce (cf. our quant-ph), and kind of let everything else go to hell.  It was great, and I have a few other similarly abstract things in the pipeline as a side benefit.  I'll bet QIP07 was great too, though.

Anyway, if you run into this wine, try a bottle.  You might even stop by your local wine store and see if they have it.  If you don't like it, complain to me and I'll reimburse you.

Cheers,

Howard

P.S. By the way, I just saw for the first time your 2004 blog post on effective research and  really enjoyed it.  It encapsulates some things I've been realizing.  (You may see me next writing a book on information-processing in categories of ordered linear spaces, and hoping to reap some dividends in cool theorems along the way.)

I don't think Mike ever tried the wine.  There are a lot of Aussie wines, and not all are available everywhere, especially not in Ontario, where I've learned to my chagrin that there is only one source---the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (well, there are some wineries you can buy from, too, but their stuff is well represnted at LCBO).  I'm now in Ontario myself---at Perimeter institute, in part to work on the book referred to in the e-mail I quoted; Mike is still in Waterloo, but now instead of working at Perimeter on quantum information, he's writing his next book, The Future of Science, on how the internet will transform scientific research.   We invited him to give the after-banquet talk at QIP 2009 in Santa Fe, and I found it inspiring; one of several things that led to me start this blog.  For those of you who don't know, here's Michael Nielsen's first book (coauthored with Ike Chuang).