Until
next week, 
AI and the Notion of Progress (Part 2): Full House
Dateline: June 21, 1998
Reference: Gould, Stephen J. (1986). Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Three Rivers Press.
In Part 1 of this series, I reviewed Richard Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype, which presented evidence that genes can control not just their "own" organisms but also—from a distance—the broader local environment, including "foreign" organisms. Dawkins wanted us to view the organism in a new light—as a member of a network that has emerged through the evolutionary process to ensure the survival of certain genes.
Such emergence could be characterized as a sign or an artifact of evolutionary progress: once there were no such networks, then there were. This is my characterization, not Dawkins'. Perhaps wisely, or perhaps because it was not particularly germane to his exposition, he did not address the issue of progress in that book.
But Dawkins' contemporary Stephen J. Gould, who like Dawkins is also a biologist and a successful author of popular books about biology, can hardly contain himself from leaping on the issue of evolutionary progress wherever it raises its head, and beating it half to death with a baseball bat. Just because something different emerges, he would argue, simply signifies an increase in variation, not progress in the sense of something "better" or "higher" emerging from something "worse" or "lower."
He presented this anti-progress argument in his 1989 book, Wonderful Life, which concluded that we're here through sheer luck and not through evolutionary design or inevitability, and has added to the argument in Full House. His fundamental arguments are not original; several illustrious scientists preceded him. His original contribution in Full House is to (try to) show that the evident lack of improvement (i.e., of progress) in individual baseball batting averages is an analogy of the lack of progress in evolution.
I do not know the game of baseball or its scoring system, but it seems that the game's batters aspire to an average score of 0.400 or greater over the course of a season. Several players have reached this goal, some more than once. If there were such a thing as progress, then the average ought to have improved, but if anything it has regressed—in recent years no batter has reached 0.400.
This is not to say that things haven't changed—they have, but the change is in the amount of variation in score averages, not in the averages themselves. The amount of variation in individuals' average scores is less now than it used to be, because more batters are hitting better—closer to 0.400 than they used to. But they have also hit a barrier: the biological capabilities if the human body. They cannot see a fast ball more clearly than the legendary Babe Ruth could, or compute its trajectory faster, or hit it harder. Physically, they and we all have been in evolutionary stasis for about 100,000 years. We are just one twig on a branch of the bush of evolution, and cannot evolve further.
In life as in baseball there is what Gould calls the "right wall" of a closed system. Evolution still has a long way to play out, but there is no reason to suppose that the best intelligence it has produced—you and me—can progress to any higher level of intelligence; we can only vary around the mean. We've hit our home run (I know just enough about baseball to know what one of those is), and if we want to glory in that, fine, but it doesn't mean much. We take a victory run around the circle and end up where we started. Homo sapiens is the end of the line. Never mind Full House: this is a full stop (British for "period").
In the book's final chapter, "An Epilog on Human Culture," Gould does cock his hat to cultural evolution (though he deplores the term, preferring "cultural change" instead) but notes at least two deep differences in principle between it and natural evolution.
The first he calls a difference in "topology": natural evolution is characterized by the bush analogy, with its twigs (species) remaining distinct from and never amalgamating with one another. (They interact, yes; but they do not join to form something new.) "Traditions"—which Gould implies are the cultural equivalent of biological species—on the other hand, do amalgamate. The second difference is in their "mechanism of inheritance." In natural evolution, that mechanism is Darwinian natural selection; in cultural evolution, it is Lamarckian hereditary transmission of ideas.
These differences, he concedes, "can validate a general and driven trend to technological progress—so very different from the minor and passive trend that Darwinian processes permit in the realm of natural evolution" (emphasis in original). Well, here, at least, is something Gould and I can agree upon, but it's an ephemeral conjunction: he goes on to argue that in science, the performing arts, and the creative arts we are doomed eventually to come up against the impassable right wall of his closed box, with every batter hitting consistent 0.400s, every bug on the planet catalogued and dissected, every musician a Beethoven. All the great scientific discoveries have already been made; there can never be another Darwin.
"I don't have any solutions to propose," he writes, almost belligerently, as one might expect from a self-described "tough-minded intellectual, a foe of all fuzziness from alien abductions to past-life regressions." But he's not despairing. He thinks there will be enough variety to go around. However, I see in this admission an indication of the poverty of a mind closed in an intellectual box it has constructed for itself, and that would have the rest of us follow it like lemmings. To end Full House, he chooses a sentence from the end of Darwin's Origin of Species:
To be continued.
Until
next week,
NEXT WEEK: AI and the Notion of Progress (Part 3): AI is evolutionary progress
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