EDGE 36 — March 10, 1998
THE THIRD CULTURE
"THE TWO STEVES"—PINKER VS. ROSE—A DEBATE (PART I)
The complex structure of the mind is the subject of this book.
Its key idea can be captured in a sentence: The mind is a system
of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve
the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way
of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects,
animals, plants, and other people. The summary can be unpacked
into several claims. The mind is what the brain does; specifically,
the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation.
The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with
a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction
with the world. The modules' basic logic is specified by our genetic
program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve
the problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors
in most of our evolutionary history. The various problems for
our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes,
maximizing the number of copies that made it into the next generation.
Steven Pinker
From How the Mind Works
(My task is to) offer an alternative vision of living systems,
a vision which recognizes the power and role of genes without
subscribing to genetic determinism, and which recaptures an understanding
of living organisms and their trajectories through time and space
as lying at the centre of biology. It is these trajectories that
I call lifelines. Far from being determined, or needing to invoke
some non-material concept of free will to help us escape the determinist
trap, it is in the nature of living systems to be radically indeterminate,
to continually construct their—our—own futures, albeit
in circumstances not of our own choosing.
Steven Rose
From Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism
EDGE IN THE NEWS
"Big, deep and ambitious questions that suggest that science is
finally edging into the domain of philosophy and religion.....breathtaking
in scope. Keep watching The World Question Center. "
"Interrogate Yourself" (Editorial: 2/7/98)
The
New Scientist
(10,894 words)
THE THIRD CULTURE
"THE TWO STEVES"—PINKER VS. ROSE—A DEBATE (PART I)
On January 21st, Steven Pinker and Steven Rose debated each
other in an event chaired by Susan Blackmore and held held at
London University's Institute of Education under the sponsorship
of Dillon's and The London Times. Over a thousand people
attended—and the event was sold out within three days of
being announced. I wish I had been there.
No two individuals better illustrate my notion of a "third culture"
which "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the
empirical world who, through their work and expository writing,
are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering
visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what
we are."
In this culture, there is no canon or accredited list of acceptable
ideas. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it
can tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously.
Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the
third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin
class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.
The Two Steves have serious disagreements. But whether it's
Steve Pinker weighing forth on the notion that the "problems for
our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes"
or Steve Rose asserting that "it is in the nature of living systems
to be radically indeterminate, to continually construct their—our—own
futures," their debate, their disagreement sharpens and clarifies.
JB
STEVEN PINKER is professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive
Sciences at MIT; director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive
Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language Learnability and Language
Development; Learnability and Cognition; The Language
Instinct; and How the Mind Works.
STEVEN ROSE, neurobiologist, is Professor of Biology and Director,
Brain and Behaviour Research Group, The Open University; author
of Lifelines; The Making Of Memory; coauthor of Not
In Our Genes; editor of From Brains To Consciousness .
SUSAN BLACKMORE, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University
of the West of England, Bristol, columnist for the Independent,
and author of In Search of the Light and the forthcoming
The Meme Machine.
Thanks to Dillon's and the London Times for granted permission
for transcribing and publishing the debate.
JB
"THE TWO STEVES"—PINKER VS. ROSE—A DEBATE (PART I)
SUSAN BLACKMORE: Before we begin I would like to say a few words
about what this debate is, and is not, all about. First it is
not pro- or anti-evolution. Both our speakers are committed to
the idea that our bodies, our brains and our minds got here by
evolution. It is not about moral issues. Neither of our speakers
will commit the naturalistic fallacy—that is confusing the
way things are with the way we want them to be. If we discover
that humans are naturally aggressive or greedy, this does not
mean that we have to accept that as right.
It is not a debate about nurture vs nature. Both Pinker and
Rose would agree that genes and environment interact in all evolutionary
processes and this is not the focus of their disagreement.
What divides them is that Steven Pinker has a view of the underlying
function of our minds that is quite different from Stephen Rose's.
Pinker is an ultra-Darwinist and therefore believes that the ultimate
function of our minds is all to do with passing on our genes—not
that everything we do now benefits our genes but that our minds
and behaviour were designed by and for the genes.
For Rose, by contrast, the underlying functions, and the motivations
for what we do, lie more in the individual. He emphasizes the
human being in his or her entire life—their "lifeline". Another
important difference is that for Pinker the mind is modular—like
the body is. It consists of a lot of different bits and pieces
that carry out their functions relatively independently. Whereas
for Rose that mechanistic reductionist view misses out on the
unity of conscious purpose of an individual human being. So, you
can see that tonight's debate concerns the crucial issues of human
identity, consciousness, and even free will.
Susan Blackmore
STEVEN PINKER: Thank you. I'll have to begin by apologizing TO
a number of you who may have come under false pretenses. I have
an ad for tonight's forum that says that "Professor Pinker is
going to argue that what people do is largely determined by their
genes, but Professor Rose believes that human beings are able
to shape their own lives." Actually, I DON'T believe that what
people do is controlled by their genes. And i don't disagree with
Professor Rose's statements that human beings are able to control
our own lives, that organisms play an active role in their own
destiny, and that we have the ability to construct our own futures.
The question is not whether those statements are false. The question
is whether those statements are BANAL.
OF COURSE we can control our own lives and control our own destinies.
For me the question is: "What is it about our minds that ALLOWS
us to control our own lives; in particular, that allows us to
control our own lives in ways that are different from the way,
say, a cat or a monkey can. That's what my book "How the Mind
Works" is about, and tonight I'll briefly explain the approach
I take in the book—sometimes called evolutionary psychology—and
contrast it with what I take to be Professor Rose's approach.
As I said, I don't believe that behavior is controlled by the
genes. I believe that behavior is controlled by beliefs and desire.
Why did Bill just get on the bus? To answer that question, you
don't have to put Bill's head in a brain scanner, and you certainly
don't have to do DNA testing on him. Your best bet would be to
ask him—and Bill might say something like, "I want to visit
my grandmother, and I know that the bus will take me there." No
answer will do as well as that one. If Bill hated the sight of
his grandmother, or if he knew that the route had changed, his
body would not be on that bus. Now this raises a problem. The
beliefs and desires that are the best explanation for Bill's behavior
are colorless, odorless, tasteless nothings; nonetheless they're
as potent a cause of behavior as one billiard ball clacking into
another. This is the ancient mind-body problem, and Professor
Rose and I agree that the answer is to be sought in material terms;
there isn't any immaterial soul or spook or spirit that magically
pulls the levers of behavior.
One of the main points of How the Mind Works is that
we can answer this question in material terms by interpreting
beliefs and desires as a kind of computation. Roughly, beliefs
are a kind of information, represented in the brain the way any
piece of matter can represent information; desires are goals,
that work in the same way as goal states in artificial intelligence
programs; the mind, therefore, performs computation. It's not,
of course, like the kind of computation done in a digital computer,
for many reasons; rather, the elementary data representations
and goal states that cause our behavior are implemented as neural
networks and ultimately can be tied to the underlying neurophysiology.
Professor Rose, in his book Lifelines, argues strenuously
against the doctrine of reductionism. My approach is most definitely
not reductionist in the bad sense of trying to explain everything
in terms of the smallest units of analysis. I believe that the
psychological level of explanation, in terms of beliefs and desires,
can be tied to a computational level, in terms of representation
and processes, which in turn can be tied to the neural level,
of synapses and neural firing. It IS reductionist in the good
sense of not allowing a ghost in the machine; that is, any special
process at the psychological level that can't be tied ultimately
to the physical level. The reductionism I embrace simply states
that the elementary units at one level of analysis can be translated
into complicated interactions at the next level of analysis.
The next question that arises is WHY we have the kinds of thoughts
and feelings that we do. I suggest an important source of information
is in the process that gave rise to the brain, namely the evolutionary
process, and in particular, the mechanism of natural selection.
Let me explain.
How do we understand complex adaptive design in the living world?
For example, the vertebrate eye is an intricately complex device,
with a lens and a cornea that focus light on a light sensitive
layer of tissue, with an iris that opens and closes in response
to the light level, and many other delicately arranged structures.
For at least a century we've explained signs of apparent engineering
design in the natural world by invoking Darwin's theory of natural
selection—the only physical explanation of how good design
could come about in the living world. There's no controversy that
natural selection is a fundamental source of our understanding
of the anatomy of the eye.
But of course the eye is useless without a BRAIN to receive
the information coming in from the retina. The signals from the
eye are not just dumped onto a blank slate. Rather, there are
highly structured circuits that process the information coming
from the eye. Now, there are countless signal processing operations
that one could imagine being applied to the visual input in principle.
But what the brain does is not just any old processing. For example,
the visual system of the brain is not like a screen-saver, where
it doesn't matter what pattern is displayed, as long as there
is a pattern. Rather, we understand visual processing as having
the function of constructing an accurate representation of the
world: the objects that are out there, their 3-D arrangement,
the material that the objects are made of, and so on. And this
function is systematically related to the goal of perception,
which is to keep the organism from falling off cliffs and bumping
into walls and getting eaten by predators.
For over a century, perception has been understood within psychology
in adaptationist terms: as a product of the process of natural
selection. And perception is, by all accounts, the most successful
part of psychology, the one that's closest to a rigorous science.
I believe that this logic can be extended. We obviously don't
just see the world, but actively INTERPRET it. Just as there exist
complex perceptual faculties that construct an interpretation
of the world from a retinal image, there exist complex COGNITIVE
faculties. I think we're equipped, for example, with intuitions
about the physical world, which allow us to understand inanimate
objects; with an intuitive sense of biology, which allows us to
figure out how the living world works; with an intuitive psychology,
which allows us to be social creatures and interpret other people's
behavior in terms of their beliefs and desires; with a sense of
number and a sense of space; and with a language faculty that
ties us together socially and allows us to exchange information.
I review in the book a variety of kinds of evidence for these
different faculties of the mind. One kind of evidence is the sheer
engineering complexity that goes into mental feats that we take
for granted. Human engineers have not been able to design robots
that duplicate common sense and visual perception and motor control
and language, because the kinds of things the brain does are so
sophisticated that we are only beginning to figure out how they
work. A second source of evidence is cross-cultural ethnographic
surveys. The faculties that I argue for can be seen in the behavior
of people in all cultures. A third source of evidence is precocious
development in the infant. There are ingenious experimental methodologies
that have discovered that babies have a precocious understanding
that the world is made up of objects and minds and living things.
Finally, there is evidence from neural dissociations—the
results of studies from the neuropsychology lab showing that our
different intuitions about living things versus physical objects
versus other people can be dissociated in neurological disease—where
a patient, say, preserves the ability to name living things, but
loses the ability to name man-made objects, or vice versa.
Of course, people aren't like Mister Spock, pure intellects
that reason abstractly about the world. In addition to our beliefs,
we have DESIRES: emotions that guide our behavior. And as with
the case of perception, many of the emotions have long been profitably
analyzed as adaptations. Fear for example has been studied for
many years, and since the time of Walter Cannon in the '30s, it's
been recognized as an adaptation that prepares an organism to
cope with danger. Evidence includes the fact that the universal
stimuli for fear are ancestral dangers such as heights, venomous
animals, confinement, and deep water; the fact that the physiological
component of such as the release of adrenalin and an increase
in heartrate, prime the organism to cope with a danger by fleeing
or otherwise dealing with it; the fact that fear can be shown
to be tied to ecologically measurable dangers—animals that
evolve on islands without predators lose their sense of fear and
are therefore sitting ducks when the islands are invaded by predators.
Similarly, sexual desire is uncontroversially an adaptation. It
is no mystery why most people would rather make love with an attractive
partner than to get a slap on the belly with a wet fish. Sexual
desire leads causally to reproduction.
In How the Mind Works, I argue that similar analyses
can profitably be applied to other emotions. I think we have well-engineered
neural systems for emotions of disgust, happiness, anger, guilt,
love of children, love of spouses, love of siblings, and so on.
How does one argue that these emotions really do have a biological
function? In the case of fear, we can appeal to the laws of physics:
it's a physical fact that a body that falls off a cliff will tend
not to live to reproduce. In the case of social emotions we have
to look to another body of knowledge to make the argument, and
very often is the analysis of inclusive fitness and reciprocity,
which can be summed up in Richard Dawkins' metaphor of the selfish
gene. To simplify: if you want to ask why people have built into
them a love of their family, their children, their parents, and
their siblings, the answer is that any gene that fosters such
emotions would be protecting and nurturing copies of itself inside
the loved one. Just as a gene for fear can be selected because
it's less likely to end up at the bottom of a cliff, a gene for
love of children can be selected because it's more likely to end
up in the body of grandchildren, and therefore to end up with
us today.
Now Professor Rose, in his book Lifelines, argues strenuously
against the expression "a gene for x", such as a gene for love
of family. He makes a number of points I completely agree with,
such as that genes don't cause behavior in any linear or direct
sense. What I mean by "a gene for X," and what ALL evolutionary
theorists mean by "a gene for X," is simply a gene that, in comparison
with its alternative allele, averaged over the other genes that
it appears with in bodies, and averaged over the environments
in appears in, probablistically leads to more behavior X—say,
being solicitous to one's children. That's all that "a gene for
X" means, and that definition is completely consistent with all
of the arguments about genetics in Lifelines. It does not
imply that genes directly cause behavior; it's simply a shorthand.
A second caveat is that the idea of the selfish gene does not
imply that people are deep down fundamentally selfish. Genes are
not the unconscious mind. The way to interpret the expression
"selfish gene" is that it's useful to calculate the effects of
genes on their own fate by thinking of them as metaphorically
selfish. Sometimes the most (metaphorically) selfish thing that
a gene can do is to build an organism that's unselfish. So there's
no contradiction between saying that selfish genes are part of
the explanation for why we have the emotions that we do, and that
some of the emotions themselves don't have a trace of selfishness
in them.
The third caveat is that I certainly don't believe that everything
that we do or feel is adaptive. Professor Rose refers to "ultra-Darwinians"
and "Darwinian fundamentalists" who believe that every trait of
an organism is adaptive. The ultra-Darwinian is a mythical creature;
there aren't any. I believe that SOME aspects of what we think
and feel are adaptive; I don't believe that ALL aspects of what
we think and feel are adaptive. In particular, in the book I argue
that such momentous human activities as dreams, religion, art,
music, written language, school math, and school science are not
adaptations, but instead are by-products of adaptations.
Why do I think that this is a valuable approach? In the book
I show that it has led to new understanding of dozens of topics
in psychology. It's spawned an enormous amount of new research
in the psychology laboratory, in ethnographic research, and in
many other areas, which I don't have time to review now. One such
finding was alluded to in the newspaper ad for this forum: there's
new evidence that many aspects of what parents do in bringing
up their children have no long-term effects on the personality
of the children. It's a finding that was predicted by evolutionary
theory, and I think it's one of the most important findings in
the history of psychology. I can't say any more about it now,
but if there's curiosity I can address it in the question period.
Finally, I'd like to talk about the alternative approach suggested
by Professor Rose. In Lifelines, Professor Rose suggests
that 20th century biology is rotten at the core. It's determinist
and reductionist, and is inspired by, and helps to prop up, capitalism
and patriarchy. Most of the scientific content of the book itself
is a lucid and fascinating overview of the spectacular discoveries
of 20th century biology, and Professor Rose presents alternative
interpretations of many of those discoveries.
However, as he points out, the discoveries themselves were all
done under the standard determinist, reductionist paradigm of
biology that he rejects. And many of the arguments in the book
try to convince us that scientists such as James Watson, Francis
Crick, and Louis Wolpert are not properly interpreting their own
discoveries. I find it hard to escape the feeling that much of
Professor Rose's approach just REDESCRIBES standard biology with
new jargon: words like "autopoiesis" and "homeodynamics" and "self-construction."
I think that there's something conspicuously missing from Professor
Rose's approach. It's the sense of AHA! The sense that there's
a new insight into problems such as How the Mind Works,
a sense that something formerly mysterious is now comprehensible,
a question that inspires research that turns up surprising new
findings.
I think this is especially noticeable in the discussions in
the book on the human mind and human behavior. The book contains
many discussions of hypotheses about human psychology, but virtually
all of them are negative: Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson are
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!! I scoured the book for anything positive:
any new hypothesis about How the Mind Works. In the entire
book, I only came up with two. One of them is the suggestion that
racism is a cause of schizophrenia, on page 104. This hypothesis
is not based, as far as I can tell, on any theory or research,
but rather is a consequence of a certain political view. I think
it's fair to say that there is no evidence whatsoever that it
is true.
The other suggestion is from page 68, in which Professor Rose
talks about the metaphors and analogies that we use in science,
a point that I completely agree with. But then he says that "the
metaphors and analogies that we find attractive are laden with
cultural values and expectations that come from outside our science.
They inevitably—inevitably!—reflect our experience as
directors of companies, or as sacked workers, as men executives,
or women child-carers, as white racists, or black footballers.
That is they are not and cannot be free from ideology."
Now this raises three questions in my mind. One is: if the ideas
that we find attractive are "inevitable," how can that be reconciled
with his idea that "we play an active part in our own destiny?"
That seems to be an area in our destiny where, according to Professor
Rose, we DON'T play an active part. It seems to me to be a strikingly
DETERMINISTIC thesis.
The second question is, what is the evidence that this is the
case? I don't know of any, but I know of some evidence that it's
NOT the case. One field that I'm familiar with, evolutionary psychology,
has been attractive to all kinds of people, from members of the
British aristocracy to sons of Marxist labor leaders, and it is
attractive to men and women in equal numbers. Furthermore I do
know of one quantitative study of whether one's social class and
social background affect one's acceptance of scientific ideas,
namely the data from Frank Sulloway on acceptance versus resistance
to revolutionary ideas in science. Sulloway actually looked at
scientific revolutions such as Darwinism, and found that there
was no correlation between social class and one's willingness
to accept new scientific ideas.
Finally there's a political dimension to Professor Rose's claim.
Lifelines, from beginning to end, talks about the harmful
political consequences that Professor Rose sees in the attempts
to relate biology to psychology. The Holocaust is mentioned in
the very first paragraph, and throughout the book we are reminded
of the way in which these ideas have been distorted by the Nazis
and other racists in the 19th and 20th centuries. And Professor
Rose adds, "this history cannot be transcended."
But there have, unfortunately, been several holocausts in this
century. Some of them have taken place in the Soviet Union, China,
and Cambodia, and many of them can be clearly related to the idea
that opinions are a product of one's social class, and therefore,
rather than being debated, the proponents of them should be "reeducated"
or worse. I don't think this necessarily taints the particular
opinions, but it is only fair to bring into a discussion that
tries to criticize the ideas of the other side for their supposed
political implications.
So if these two hypotheses about the mind are the best that
Professor Rose's "dialectical biology" can do, I would like to
suggest that it is not a particularly promising way to understand
How the Mind Works. Thank you.
STEVEN ROSE: There are I suppose a number of possible ways you
can interpret what it is we're doing here this evening. One, which
would be apparent to anyone who's looked at Lifelines and
How the Mind Works is that Steve and I share a literary
agent, a publisher, and you could make a straight-forwardly economically
determinist argument that we're here to sell our books. An alternative
argument would be that we write books rather as peacocks extend
their tails, and that is that it's a way of demonstrating—rather
than flashing our genitals at you—that we have actually rather
good genes . This would in a sense be a version of the ultra-Darwinist
argument.
There is another way of looking at it which explains I suspect
more seriously why we're all here, and that is that the issues
that we have to discuss this evening run far deeper than modern
science, they go right the way back through centuries of debate,
beyond Darwin, back through, certainly, a good chunk of the Judeo-Christian
tradition; they are, as Susan said at the beginning, about determinism
and free will, and how one understands the living world that there
is around us, and it's those issues I want to discuss. But I do
want to say one other thing as well—just as Steve began his
talk by trying to ask why someone got on a bus. All three of the
possible alternative explanations that I've given you could be
right. They are not necessarily mutually incompatible. That is,
as Mary Midgley puts it, we live in one world, but a big one,
and we live in a world in which there are multiple possible legitimate
explanations of things that we're trying to study. There are also
false explanations of the things that we're trying to study, and
in trying to argue for plurality, as I will do this evening, I
don't want to depart for one moment from my claim about the errors
of some of those views that I disagree with.
I've got two tasks here this evening: showing where I disagree
with Steve Pinker, and proposing in more detail the alternative
viewpoints that I take in Lifelines and The Making of Memory.
Steve said there wasn'ch about How the Mind Works in Lifelines,
and that'rfectly true—I did write about it in The Making
of Memory, and Lifelines has a different task. I'ing to
try and interweave these two. And again, let me pause for a moment
also to say what I'ing. Steve makes in his book, and he made at
the end of what he had to say there, what I can only describe
as a personal political attack concerning the implications of
some of the things that I'ritten about.
I do feel very strongly about issues of what I'alled neuro-genetic
determinism, and the political and social implications of some
of the ideas that are floating around within genetics at the moment.
It wasn' intention to discuss them this evening. I'ing to try
not to be riled by what he said, but to put it slightly to one
side. I am here essentially as a practicing biologist. I're for
the same reasons I wrote Lifelines. I'pent my research
life studying real living animals, and the workings of their brains,
and worrying about the relevance of what I'bserved to my own lived
human experience. And like other biologists, I find the rather
abstract theorizing of those who spend more time with their computers
than with living organisms a bit distressing.
So my case is rooted in understanding how real brains and living
processes in general work. I'm going to focus on Steve's main
theses and show how Lifeline's approach gives us a very
different understanding of them. Steve defines mind—he did
it now and he did it before, as the information-processing property
of the brain. The mind he talks about isn't a coherent unity;
it's an interacting community of distinct modules, each specialized
for a particular function. It's evolved, as he explained to us,
as a device for enhancing human survival, and reproductive success,
according to ultra-Darwinian principles. Now as Susan said at
the beginning, no biologist is going to have any problems with
the claims that we humans—all of our attributes, behavioral
as well as physical, have evolved, and they've been honed to their
present form, at least in good part, by the workings of natural
selection. The devil as usual is in the details. Steve, like me,
quotes the evolutionary biologist, Theodesius Dobzhansky —
"Nothing in biology makes sense escept in the light of evolution".
I have a crucial emendation: "Nothing in biology makes sense
except in the light of history." That is, evolutionary history,
developmental history, social history, the history of our science
itself. It was the last clause there that he took particular exception
to; I'm not going to try and defend it this evening, I've got
other tasks in mind. If he wishes to discount the evidence of
philosophers, sociologists and economists who've studied scientific
processes over the last 20 or 30 years he's at liberty to do so,
but I suspect he's talking outside his terrain of knowledge.
Let me deal however with the little matter of mind. Steve's
mind is a machine, a sort of abstraction that computer engineers
program when exploring artificial intelligence. The megaphone
diplomacy of the dust jacket of his book proclaims, "this is the
best book ever written on the human mind." This is, I think, the
vulgar dismissal of several thousand years of human science and
philosophy. His mind, like a computer, deals with information.
By contrast—and this is what I want to emphasize—real
brains transform dead information into living meaning—the
making sense of the world around us. It's a meaning which is given
to sensory inputs by the working of the brain. It's based on experience,
and it's provided through its evolutionary and developmental history.
Let me give you an example, from Steve's own book. A footprint,
he says, carries information. But the information, without an
observer to give that information meaning, is strictly dead. Think
for example of Robinson Crusoe on his island; finding a footprint
on the sandy shore, the multiple meanings he gives that particular
footprint- fear, anxiety, excitement, interpretation based on
human history, and so on. Culture, history, personal experience—they
all feed into that meaning.
Which brings me to another crucial point, that I emphasize again
and again in Lifelines—that is finding the right level
of explanation for any phenomenon, the fundamental point of scientific
method—and here I mean not just natural science, but all
science. Steve's agenda is grandiose, taking on in his last chapter
the meaning of life, but his answer is I think slightly less relevant
than 42. Take human love, for example—Steven explains love,
and he did so again on Start the Week—as resulting from the
shared interest of partners in the genes of their offspring. No
possibility here for homosexual, same-sex love, no possibility
here for the love which goes between—for people who are not—and
infants who are not one's own genetic offspring, and so on. It's
just this impoverishment of thought, which occurs again and again
in the ways in which these terms are used, by people of Steve's
persuasion in this context, that I find, both as a human and as
a biologist, distinctly troublesome. Sure, as a neuro-scientist
I can talk about the firing of cells in the hypothalamus; hormone
surges, cortical representations, all the things that go on in
the brain when one's in love. Neither that, nor the genes, tell
us anything about the feeling of what it's like to be in love—what
it means to be a person in love, two people in love, and their
interactions.
The fact is that Steve's mind isn't a unified, coherent center
of conscious thought, or emotion, or action—it's not a product
of the inextricable interplay of biology and culture. It's a sort
of Swiss army knife—it's modular. It's his analogy, not mine—it's
a compressed miracle of pull out devices—if not for taking
stones from horses' hooves, then for seeing stereoscopically,
or speaking grammatically. As Jerry Fodor points out, in the current
issue of the London Review of Books—and it's surprising,
because Jerry ought to have been one of Steve's heroes—nothing
in this assemblage of independent modules enables us to understand
what it means to be a person, with a conscious RIS. Neither cognitive
neuroscience, Steve's area, or mine, neurobiology, can yet begin
to approach that sort of problem. Each module, he argues, is evolved
separately, and operates autonomously, although in the interests
of the genes that created it. The modules spring fully formed,
and unmediated from their genes, each presumably containing a
miniature blueprint for a particular implement within the Swiss
army knife. And here we come to the core of the argument, which
Steve takes over holus-bolus from Richard Dawkins. For all the
various complex aspects of being an organism, being a person,
are merely ways in which our selfish genes program the lumbering
robots which constitute us, to serve their, that is the genes',
interest. This is precisely the view which Lifeline opposes. Just
as Steve's mind has little to do with real brains, his genes have
little to do with real strands of DNA, this is what I work with
in the lab—they're theoretical entities. Real humans, like
all other living organisms, grow and develop. They create themselves
through the dynamic interplay of DNA and the cellular orchestra
in which it's embedded, and the cells, with their external environment.
Modularity, if it exists, emerges dynamically. Now I want to insist,
despite what he said, that living organisms exist in four dimensions—three
of space and one of time—and they can't be read off from
the single dimension of DNA. Organisms and minds aren't empty
phenotypes related one to one, with particular patterns of genes.
Our lives form a developmental trajectory, or lifeline, and are
stabilized by the operation of what I call homeodynamics—they're
principles I discuss in the book. This trajectory isn't determined
by our genes, nor is it partitioned into neatly dichotomous categories
called nature and nurture. Rather, it's what I call an autopoetic
process—he doesn't like the term— it's shaped, I say,
by the interplay of specificity and plasticity. Insofar as any
aspect of life can be said to be in the genes, our genes provide
the capacity for specificity, a lifeline relatively impervious
to developmental and environmental buffering; and also plasticity,
the ability to respond appropriately to unpredictable environmental
contingencies; that is, to experience. The crucial thing is this.
All living organisms have simultaneously both to be and to become.
Take a newborn baby, for example. The baby is born with a sucking
reflex. A little while later, the baby develops into a child which
doesn't suckle, it chews its food. Chewing involves a totally
different set of muscles and operations than suckling. To develop,
the newborn baby has both to be competent as a suckler, and to
transform itself into a chewer. And it's that dynamic, that self-construction,
which is completely lost in the abstract understanding of genes
and the behaviors they control. And what I fear is that the reductionist
and simplistic approach which Steve has offered us freezes life.
In attempting to capture its being it loses becoming. It turns
process into reified objects. Organisms are open systems—they're
far >from dynamic equilibrium. Continuity is provided by a constant
flow of energy through them. Every molecule, every organelle,
every cell, is in a constant state of flux. Formation, transformation,
renewal. Dynamic stability of form persists, though every constituent
of that form, every molecule, has been replaced. And the stability
depends on the capacity of complex interacting systems to self-organize.
In this view of living systems, there are no master molecules,
no naked replicators controlling cellular events within the screened-off
tranquillity of a nuclear board room. Genes, lengths of DNA, are
engaged in a continual metabolic interchange with other cellular
components. A molecular democracy constrained by cellular organization,
and the needs of the organism.
And now finally I come to the question of evolution, and above
all evolutionary psychology, and Steve's famous simplistic reverse
engineering, by which we're to understand How the Mind Works.
The trouble with reverse engineering the mind, is that by contrast
with human artifacts, when we're told the story about how it might
have arisen, we've simply no way of testing it out. Evolutionary
stories, almost by definition just-so stories of the sort Rudyard
Kipling provided when he explained how the elephant got its trunk—I'm
quite sure that we could find an evolutionary explanation why
so many of the men writing in this area are called either Steve
or Richard. It doesn't actually, however, help us forward at all.
Now although Steve Pinker is aware of the fallacy of assuming
that every biological feature is adaptively designed, through
infinitely flexible and all-wise natural selection, he frequently
ignores his own caveats. Thus at one point he discusses the tortuous
route that the human seminal ducts take from the testes up through
the body and across the ureter to the penis, and explains this
on the well-known but Kiplingesque grounds that "the testes of
our reptilian ancestors were inside their bodies. The bodies of
mammals are too hot for the production of sperm, so the testes
gradually descended into a scrotum." If Superman is so clever,
why does he wear his underpants outside his trousers? Natural
selection, if so clever, why don't they evolve sperm which can
survive at higher temperatures, rather than the ungainly and hazardous
physical control system that was adopted? Almost certainly it's
either because of contingency, the chance events that another
Steve, Steve Gould, evoked in his rich account of evolutionary
process in his book Wonderful Life, or because there are other
design constraints on what can or cannot be achieved by natural
selection. That is, natural selection doesn't work unrestrictedly,
a la carte, but is limited to a table d'hote choice of only a
limited range of options. We don't have to find adaptations for
everything. Again, the alternative viewpoints in Lifelines:
organisms are in constant interaction with their environments.
Organisms actively select and transform their environments, just
as environments select and transform organisms. I don't just mean
humans, I mean any living system. Even a single-celled organism
chooses, changes, transforms its environment in particular ways.
Evolutionary change occurs as a result of the continued interception
of lifeline trajectories with changing environments. Such change
occurs at multiple-levels, from the molecular to the species.
That is, the individual gene, selfish or not, is not the only
site of evolutionary change. Natural selection is the prime, but
not the only mechanism of this change. There are constraints on
selective processes. Not all change is adaptive, as Steve has
agreed. Some may be contingent, accidental, accidents of history
and essentially neutral in its effect. And because of the extent
to which organisms select and modify environments, they're not
simply the passive victims of selective processes, but play an
active part in their—in ou r—own destiny.
Third, evolution isn't indefinitely flexible. Not all that's
possible is achievable. This is partly because living processes
are in their essence only comprehensible in historical context,
and there are no such things in life as de novo engineering solutions
to problems. The material for evolutionary change is restricted
to what's currently present. Opening certain pathways closes others.
Further, there are physical and chemical constraints on the structural
possibilities available through evolution, from the rates of diffusion
of dissolved gases, to the mechanical properties of the calcium
phosphate of bones, or the cellulose walls of plant cells. These
limit cell size, body volumes, rates of movements, patterns of
behavior, and they can't be bypassed by any amount of genetic
tinkering. Let's be clear: humans can't be turned into angels
by grafting onto us a genetic program for wings; it's nothing
to do with virtue, but because no wing bone and muscle structure
could achieve the lift to enable us to fly. What we do possess,
courtesy of our evolutionary history, is the cerebral, social
and technical facilities for every single one of us to construct
societies and machines, enabling all of us to fly, without the
need for genetic change at all. Is this dynamic which is so lacking
from what used to be called sociobiology and is now called evolutionary
psychology, to which Steve has become such an enthusiastic convert.
He argues his mind modules evolved to suit humanity's Stone Age
existence, to help our ancestors survive as social animals, by
lying, swindling convincingly, but by being able to detect lying
and swindling in our neighbors, by murdering our step-children
but protecting our genetic kin. The Stone Age they portray has
I always feel something of the Flintstone quality about it; that
is current U.S. suburban mores transported into the dim past.
Further, for reasons that are completely unclear to me, evolution
of brains and behavior apparently stopped in the Stone Age, though
elsewhere Steve points out quite rightly the time that's elapsed
since then would be quite adequate for quite dramatic brain changes.
The point is that once we accept that the key to understanding
living processes isn't just evolution but history, and abandon
the extraordinarily static world-view of ultra-Darwinism, then
all this romanticized Stone Age nonsense falls into proper perspective.
It's surely precisely the unique properties of human biology that
have enabled us to evolve the minds and societies that we inhabit
today. But in evolving these societies our minds and brains too
have been profoundly changed.
Let me give one last biological example. The human cerebral
cortex has evolved from structures which in our reptilian ancestors
were used for odor detection. On the Pinker model of the world,
this would mean that we think by smelling. We don't. Old structures
develop new functions as part of the lifeline trajectories of
individuals, societies, and species.
Now finally, what I find very odd about all this macho evolutionary
talk, with its wild speculative finale on the meaning of life,
is the extent to which in the last analysis it wants to have its
cake and eat it. We are, evolutionary psychology argues, mainly
the deterministically driven products of our selfish genes and
their sole interest, that of replication. All our deepest desires
and emotions, our abject selfish failures, as well as our most
selfless ambitions to create a more beautiful world, these are
all simply shadow-play. Yet at times Steve, quite rightly, like
Richard Dawkins and others, recoils from this bleak vision. He
is in some unexplained way free; as he puts it, very clearly,
in the book, if his genes don't like what he does, they can go
jump in the lake. Now, what I find very puzzling is to understand
where this freedom comes from. Does it fall from the sky? Are
we suddenly to invoke some new deity to enable him to escape from
the deterministic trap into which he's painted himself? I simply
can't go with this Cartesian split. This is why I want to claim
that I'm talking a deeper and a richer materialism than Steve
is in his account. It's a materialism that takes account of dynamism,
and isn't statically frozen into the past. And it's this richer
understanding of biology, the mechanistically driven approach,
which helps us to understand that for us, like all living creatures,
the future is radically unpredictable. And this is the take-home
message, not any of the political overtones or undertones which
Steve has chosen to read into it, which is in Lifelines.
I have written political books, or books which have attempted
to discuss politics; Lifelines doesn't. It's an attempt
to discuss biological processes. An attempt to help us understand
how we need to take on board the reductionist triumphs of biology
of the last century, which he has so eloquently described; but
also recognize that in order to understand living processes in
their depth and richness, these triumphs of genetics, of biochemistry,
of the study of human behavior of the last decades, need to be
set into a much richer and deeper context. It's that context which
I insist the new biology ought to be about. And what it implies
above all, so far as humans are concerned, is that we have the
ability to construct our own futures, though in circumstances
not of our own choosing. This ability is provided by our genes
as part of the living dynamic processes in which they are embedded.
And in the final words of Lifelines, it is therefore our
biology which makes us free. Thank you.
PINKER: Many points that Professor Rose has made puzzle me,
because I don't understand what they have to do with any of the
theses of evolutionary psychology or How the Mind Works.
The claims that "we're not infinitely flexible," that there are
no "empty organisms," that organisms are "open systems organized
in four dimensions," "self-organizing," "are not just naked replicators,"
"actively select their options," "interact with their environment,"
"should be understood at multiple levels," "are dynamic," are
"not passive victims," "are not indefinitely flexible," and so
on—all these are points that I completely agree with, and
I don't understand what the point of Professor Rose's argument
is.
Let me concentrate, then, on more substantive points. Number
One: Our own ability to defeat the metaphorical designs of our
genes, such as choosing to remain childless, has nothing to do
with Cartesian dualism, and I explain in How the Mind Works
where they do come from. The mind is composed of many parts. One
part is sexual desire; another part is an ability to apply cause
and effect reasoning to the world. In the world we live in now,
we have available to us contraception, which was not available
in the world in which we evolved. One part of the mind, the part
that figures out that one can have the pleasures of sex without
necessarily having children, can be applied today in a way that
would not have been possible as we evolved. That's a purely mechanistic,
non-Cartesian explanation.
Second, about reverse engineering. It is NOT the empty exercise
that Professor Rose hinted at. As Ernst Mayr, someone that Professor
Rose quotes approvingly, points out, if it were not for the adaptationist
program, or reverse engineering, we would still be ignorant about
what most of the parts of the body do, such as the spleen. The
science of physiology was born when Harvey reverse-engineered
the circulatory system by noticing that there are valves in the
vein and that they must be there to help the blood circulate.
In the case of psychology, the reverse engineering can work
if one does it in two steps. First, do the psychology that characterizes
the properties of an aspect of the human mind. Second, have an
INDEPENDENT optimality analysis of the domain in question that
could characterize—completely independently of our study
of the mind—what the optimal solution to an adaptive problem
would be under the constraints available. That can come from optics
in the case of vision; from dynamics and kinematics, in the case
of motor control; from the theory of computational systems, in
the case of memory, and so on. It's the degree of fit between
the independent optimality analysis and the empirical facts of
the mind that break the circle and make reverse-engineering something
other than just-so story telling.
Number Three: Professor Rose ridicules my allusions to life
in the Stone Age. In fact it is not a fantasy of a Flintstones
way of life, but simply points out obvious historical facts—and
Professor Rose rightly emphasizes the importance of history—such
as that many of the features of life today that we take for granted
had a recent historical origin and could not have been part of
the environment in which we evolved, such as written language,
contraception, police, court systems, formal education and, so
on. One can come up with surprising hypotheses based on these
minimal and noncontroversial assumptions about the difference
between the world that we live in now and the world in which we
evolved.
Fourth, it is not true that I suggested that the only form of
love is love of spouses, which I suggested was a way of cherishing
the other person who has as much at stake in one's children as
one does oneself. I also talk about long-term companionate love,
as would be found in a pair of close friends, and about the love
of family. He refers to our ability to love non-biological offspring;
well, there is an empirical prediction that the love of biological
offspring is not the same as love of non-biological offspring,
and Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have done an extensive set of
studies showing that indeed those two forms of love are not the
same. Their analysis of the different patterns of love and abuse
of biological children versus step-children bears out the hypothesis
that those are different kinds of love. But I have to stop now.
ROSE: Let me just pick up a couple of points in
Steve's response. He says that our ability has nothing to do
with Cartesian dualism. He it is who wrote that if the genes don't
like what he does they can go jump in the lake. I didn't say that.
He wrote it. Now where did these different parts of the mind that
he's talking about and which conflict with one another come from
if they're not generated as the result of interaction between
genes, the cells and the environment during the wiring or development
of the brain? Materialism has to insist that our genes have to
do with everything; they have to do with both, if you like the
genetic urge to reproduce that he described, and the desire to
have sex without reproducing that he described as the advantage
of contraception. That's where materialism comes in, and that's
where my challenge to him of being a Cartesian endures, because
it's precisely where he wants to let the mind, or these different
bits of the mind float free, that I won't accept.
Now we come to the issue of reverse engineering. He's quite
wrong when he says that physiology was studied by reverse engineering;
when William Harvey likened the pumping—the workings of the
heart—to the workings of a pump, this wasn't reverse engineering,
he was drawing a metaphor as to how you could understand the mathematics
of heart function. It was a tremendously revealing and important
metaphor. The problem we have in science, particularly in biology,
is to distinguish between metaphor, like that,which gives you
mechanical properties; analogy, when we say that a brain is like
a computer, which can be very misleading in a variety of ways
on which both he and I would agree; and strict homology, when
we say that a process is evolutionarily developed and depends
on mechanisms that are identical in our reptilian ancestors and
ourselves,. The mistake that evolutionary psychology makes in
this reverse engineering discussion is constantly to mistake metaphor
and analogy for homology, and draw what I regard as both horrendous
scientific and horrendous political conclusions >from it. Finally,
love—oh dear, that really won't do, Steve, you were the person
again on Start the Week who explained love in terms of shared
the genetic interest that you and your partner had in the rearing
of offspring. You were indeed challenged on Start the Week about
why you yourself chose to remain childless, and I think you handled
that perfectly appropriately. But what I'm trying to insist is
that the term love cannot be reduced simply to that shared genetic
interest. It cannot I think even be sensibly argued to have arisen
homologously as a result of evolutionary processes which indeed
produce a shared genetic interest in all of us in our offspring.
Human life, human society, is much much richer than these travesties.
And I do insist that what you offer is a Flintstone type travesty
of life today. I really won't buy the Daly and Wilson argument
about infanticide. I suspect that there is a wealth of criminological
knowledge which sort of makes much better sense than this one
study that you and your evolutionary psychology colleagues constantly
quote in order to boost this particular argument.
(PART II — Q&A — to follow)
EDGE IN THE NEWS
"Interrogate Yourself" (Editorial: 2/7/98)
The
New Scientist
INTERROGATE YOURSELF
?
To get ahead in science, you have to be very focused on the
here and now. Experiments work only when they are given much painstaking
care and attention, and even when they do, it is rare that they
add more than a small brick or two to the slowly growing tower
of knowledge. But are scientists really so caught up in the next
small step that they forget the big questions that underpin their
work? Not at all, if an unusual site on the Web is anything to
judge by.
A hundred or so well-known scientists (plus a few engineers,
high-tech entrepreneurs and even some science journalists) were
e-mailed with the simplest of all questions: "What questions are
you asking yourself?" The resulting answers—or rather questions—are
to be found at the World Question Center.
Surprisingly, it turns out that only a few scientists are totally
taken up with the daily concerns of their narrow subdiscipline.
Rather more seem a bit too worried about the conventional Big
Problems: the destruction of the environment, the world's growing
population, or the shocking effects of a materialistic society
on young people.
The majority, however, are ranging far and wide across science
to ask themselves big, deep and ambitious questions—questions
that suggest that science is finally edging into the domain of
philosophy and religion.
Here are a few of the most breathtaking in scope, drawn respectively
from John Barrow, Paul Davies and Lee Smolin. "Is the Universe
a great mechanism, a great computation, a great symmetry, a great
accident, or a great thought?" "What is information and where
does it ultimately originate?" "Is the flow of time something
real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that
hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of
moments?"
Elsewhere on the site, other physicists join biologists and
computer scientists to pose equally challenging but very different
biggies. "What is the crucial distinction between inanimate matter
and an entity which can act as an 'agent', manipulating the world
on its own behalf, and how does that change happen?" asks Nobel
laureate Philip Anderson. "Are the most remarkable things in life—sights,
sounds, colours, tastes—really just subjective epiphenomena
with no role or significance in the 'objective world'?" asks Julian
Barbour, echoing Freeman Dyson's simple "What goes on inside the
head of a baby?"
Many of these questions have been asked for millennia: the difference
now is that while many of them sound metaphysical, they may well
no longer be unanswerable. Davies's question on the nature on
information, for example, is being addressed by new insights from
quantum physics. And Rodney Brooks takes Anderson's question further
and in so doing hints at a way to come up with answers. "What
is the mathematical essence that distinguishes living from non-living,
so that we can engineer a transcendence across the current boundaries?"
We may understand life through building it, even if it is inside
a computer.
We might also be able to discover more about what we are by
comparing ourselves with what we are not. "A chimpanzee cannot
understand Bessel functions or the theory of black holes. Human
forebrains are a few ounces bigger that a chimp," points out computer
scientist Clifford Pickover in his question. Of course, if we
learn what life is and what makes us special, this opens up new
and astonishing possibilities for human growth. As neurophysiologist
William Calvin puts it in perhaps the most elegant question: "How
will minds expand, once we understand how the brain makes mind?"
There is perhaps only one fly in Calvin's ointment. Even if
we understand how the brain works, can we really expect to understand
subjective experience, as Barbour and Dyson ask? Or will we need
a whole new science to make any progress at all? One of the questioners,
biologist Francisco Varela, argues for just that: "Why the reluctance
to consider one's experience as a realm to be explored with a
discipline just as rigorous as the one invented by science for
material phenomena?" Astrophysicist Piet Hut adds his own plea:
"What will be the framework for a scientific study of the subject-object
split?" Unfortunately, the question seem thoroughly intractable.
Which probably just means that the right question has not been
posed yet. Keep watching The World Question Center.
related site:
a.. See
"In an Online Salon, Scientists Sit Back and Ponder" at http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/123097questions.html
on The New York Times on the Web (registration required)
From New Scientist, 7 February 1998
© Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 1998
