Only a Game

Weird Decisions

In one of the strangest findings in recent psychology, it seems the grouping of objects affects human decision making. Dubbed the group-contagion effect, it seems that when looking for objects with a negative connotation (defective or infected) people prefer to select from objects spaced further apart, and when looking for objects with a positive connotation (beneficial or desirable) people prefer to select from objects that are more closely packed.

The current explanation being offered is that we naturally imagine that the traits of objects transfer to their close neighbours - that is, closely packed objects are considered "contagious". But this explanation is just as weird as the phenomena: it might be logical if the people in question were arranging the objects, but why should it affect their decisions when choosing from pre-arranged objects?

It's another reminder that while we tend to believe our decision processes are logical, our subconscious and subjective beliefs are always working to sway our conclusions.

Circumstantial Blindness

As you push open the door to leave a building, a man shouts obscenities at you. What a rude man, you think. But unbeknownst to you, when you flung open the door you hit the man in the face. You interpreted the event in terms of the man's personality traits (he's rude), and ignored the situation which caused him to behave this way (you hit him in the face with a door). You've fallen prey to circumstantial blindness.

In psychology, this phenomena is known as the fundamental attribution error (or correspondence bias). These terms refer to the tendency to presume that a particular situation is best explained by the (internal) personality traits of the people involved, not the (external) circumstances surrounding those people. In other words, when we observe an event we tend to process it in terms of what it tells us about the people involved, and underestimate the importance of the context within which the event occurred.

In 1967, Edward Jones and Victor Harris ran an experiment in which subjects were asked to assess a person's attitude towards Fidel Castro based on an essay they had written. In one of the studies, the subjects were told that a coin had been tossed to determine whether the writer would pen a pro-Castro essay, or an anti-Castro essay – that is, the essays did not represent the attitudes of their writers, and the presented attitudes had been assigned at random. Despite being told this, the subjects consistently assigned pro-Castro sentiments to the authors of essays that expressed a positive view of Castro and vice versa. Even being told that circumstances were the root cause of what was written, people still linked their impression of the text directly to the attitude of its writer.

Jones & Harris used the term correspondence bias to represent this discovery, and the experiment caused Jones to observe:

I have a candidate for the most robust and repeatable finding in social psychology: the tendency to see behaviour as caused by a stable personal disposition of the actor when it can be just as easily explained as a natural response to more than adequate situational pressures.

This work was later pursued by Lee Ross and his team in the 1970s, who first coined the rather clunky term fundamental attribution error (or FAE) for the phenomena. A simpler way to understand the concept is with the phrase it's not you, it's here, or to put it another way: people are 'victims of circumstances' more often than we think.

Consider one of Ross' most striking experiments. Subjects observed two sets of basketball players shooting hoops indoors, but were not told that while one of the two groups was playing, the lighting in the gym had been lowered. Needless to say, the players in low lighting conditions did not play as well as those in the well-lit gym. Nonetheless, the subjects consistently attributed the poor performance to the player's lack of skill, not to the lighting conditions in the gym.

In another experiment, subjects were placed into pairs and randomly assigned the role of questioner and answerer for a general knowledge quiz. During a preparation interval, both subjects created a set of difficult questions on whatever subject they choose, then during the test the questioner asked their questions to the answerer. Afterwards, they were asked to rate each other on a number of different traits. Everyone involved knew the circumstances behind the test, but nonetheless they consistently tended to rate the questioner as having better general knowledge skills, despite the fact that they had chosen questions from their own areas of expertise.

This finding – that people tend to explain events in terms of personal characteristics even when there was a clear situational influence – caused some economists to believe that personality could be all but ignored and that only the circumstances needed to be taken into account, although work by Brent Roberts challenges this view, and confirms that personality does indeed play a critical role in life. It's not that personality doesn't matter, it is simply that we tend to prefer explanations in terms of personality to those in terms of circumstance.

At least, we do when we're dealing with other people. It seems that while we are too quick to explain the behaviour of other people in terms of their nature, we naturally tend to explain (or perhaps, excuse) our own actions in terms of the situation. Jones and Nisbett call this the actor-observer bias, or to put it another way: if you do it, it's your fault; if I do it, I'm a victim of circumstances.

So is correspondence bias another bug in the human operating system, like cognitive dissonance? Well, yes and no. Research by J.G. Miller has revealed that this effect varies according to culture, so it is not part of the underlying wetware (like cognitive dissonance), but rather something we learn. In Western, individualistic societies the tendency to circumstantial blindness is quite pronounced. Yet in Eastern, collectivist societies the reverse tendency has been demonstrated – explanations in terms of situation are often preferred to those in terms of personal traits.

Although these psychological phenomena are well documented, and even quite widely distributed (the popular book The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, discusses the fundamental attribution error, for instance) we are a long way short of fully appreciating their implications. If we tend to turn to explanations in terms of personality too easily, what does this mean for our societies?

One particular consequence of note has been explored by Donald Dripps in the context of criminal justice: because of circumstantial blindness, we are frequently too certain in our application of blame. In his paper, Fundamental Retribution Error: Criminal Justice and the Social Psychology of Blame, he suggests:

In the actual practice of criminal justice, we frequently give legal force to intuitive judgements of personal responsibility, and this practice is approved by many strands of both popular theory and prevailing practice. But our intuitions about blame are not to be trusted. What criminal law reformers can learn from the research on FAE—and it may be all we can learn from it—is that we should reach judgements of blame with as much humility as possible.

We learn to trust our judgements, because to doubt them constantly is the path to insecurity and madness. Yet in the case of other people's behaviour, we would do well to remember that the context within which events unfold are like a secret actor, working unseen from behind the scenes, but with as much a part to play in what occurs as the people themselves.

Creationism Exam Question Scrapped

The BBC reports that a question on creationism in the GCSE biology examination has been scrapped following complaints. Here's an extract from the news article:

An exam board has scrapped a GCSE biology question about creationism after admitting it could be misleading. The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance paper asked pupils how the Bible's theory of creation seeks to explain the origins of life. AQA stressed that pupils taking its biology GCSE were not required to study creationism as a scientific theory. But it admitted that describing it as a "theory" could be misleading, and said it would review the wording of papers.

The article also notes that "candidates were expected to have some understanding of [creationism]". Indeed, how are evolutionary theories to be fully appreciated if they are not contrasted against something? (Ideally, they would be contrasted against each other, but that's too advanced a topic for high school students).

But there's a grave error here that isn't covered by the BBC article: talk about "the Bible's theory of creation" is entirely misleading, since the book of Genesis provides an account of creation, not a theory. Most Christians interpret the opening chapters of Genesis allegorically. It is creation scientists (i.e. Young Earth Creationists) who deploy scripture as the foundation for their theory (i.e. explanatory principle), first proposed in the 1960s, although of course natural theology goes back far further.

As a current affairs subject, I contend that the topic of creationism (and in particular, the clash between proponents of this view and staunch defenders of evolutionary theories) is relevant in the science classroom, although only as a minor side topic. Furthermore, it makes more sense here than in a high school religious studies class, which may cover origin beliefs but not the creation science movement, which is a science or philosophy topic.

I continue to support Professor Reese's claim that teachers should be allowed to (briefly) discuss creationism when a student comes from a family which holds these beliefs. Shouldn't we be encouraging debate in our classrooms, rather than stiffling it by asserting dogmatic claims as to the boundaries of science?

Myths of Evolution

This serial ran from January 15th to February 26th 2009, in six parts. Originally written as a throwaway Focus essay, it rapidly became apparent that it would work better as a serial. The purpose of the exercise was to identify specific stories that have been used to present various evolutionary theories in the popular media of the last 150 years. Most of these stories are metaphysical in nature, and for each such "myth", an alternative spin is offered to show that while science is in principle neutral, the way it is presented is rarely free of bias. Each of the parts ends with a link to the next one, so to read the entire serial, simply click on part one, below, and then follow the "next" links to read on.

Here are the six parts:

1. Scientific Metaphysics
   
2. The Ladder of Progress
3. Only the Strong Survive
4. The Selfish Gene
5. Kin Selection
6. Survival of the Fittest

This serial commemorates the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, and the 150 year anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. It is dedicated to the memory of Stephen Jay Gould.

Deconstructing Flow

What are the neurological underpinnings of the experience of Flow described by Csikszentmihalyi? Do we know enough about the brain to speculate?

Roots

This piece explores the concept of Flow, which I am assuming the reader is already familiar with, since the purpose of this piece is speculative discourse, not instruction. It is not about videogames – when I have finished this exploration, I have some specific points to make in that context, but that will come later. The following pieces may be essential to appreciating my train of thought:

• Paragraph six of this piece on videogame difficulty (the paragraph accompanying the graph of flow) describes Flow in a nutshell.

• The piece on Why You Play Games is also useful, particularly the brain diagram, and an appreciation for the reward system and the role of dopamine.

Disclaimer

This account necessarily takes a reductive view of behaviour. I don't believe that any account of behaviour solely in terms of parts of the brain, neurotransmitters or other reductive elements can ever be complete: one must also take account of the complete experience, and the context of that experience. However, since my express goal is to couple Csikszentmihalyi's psychological observations with a hypothetical neurobiological model, it is necessary to focus on the reductive elements to achieve this goal.

Neurotransmitters and Flow

The Flow channel draws upon three specific concepts: first, there is optimal experience (which is Flow itself) which corresponds with the Flow channel. Second, anxiety, which occurs when the challenges outstrips the skills of the subject. Finally, boredom, which occurs when the skills of the subject outstrip the degree of challenge.

What is the neurology of anxiety? This is easy – the neurotransmitter epinephrine (adrenaline) underlies both excitement and fear, with anxiety occurring when the fear centre (amygdala) perceives threat, loss of control or a similar problem.

What is the neurology of boredom? This is trickier – here we are not looking for the presence of particular neurotransmitters but their absence. Psychologists note that depression and boredom are related, which suggests boredom is related to serotonin, which is involved in maintaining a feeling of well-being. But I rather suspect boredom is simply the absence of epinephrine – which is to say, rather obviously, that boredom is the same as the absence of excitement.

If this is the case, then one dimension of the neurology of Flow is simply epinephrine, which is to say, excitement. This makes sense: if an aspect of Flow is engagement, then feeling a certain degree of excitement in a task is potentially a requirement for engagement. This degree of excitement may be very low, or it could be very high – observationally, we can distinguish between the the Flow of a test pilot or racing car driver, the Flow of a crossword puzzle, or the Flow of meditation – each is progressively less exiting than the other, but all are considered examples of Flow.

There must, therefore, be another element, and unsurprisingly the obvious candidate is the neurotransmitter dopamine, the “goal protein” released from the pleasure centre in the brain (nucleus accumbens), which as I discussed on the ihobo site last week seems to be involved in all enjoyable experience. Linking this with Flow is trivial: the very first condition of Flow that Csikszentmihalyi cites is “clear goals”.

Yet Flow is not goal-orientation, the striving to achieve (although it may include this) since many situations described as Flow are process-oriented – such as being in control of a vehicle, dancing, meditation etc. It seems to me from my observation of players that dopamine is not just released when a goal is achieved, it is also released when a goal is pursued. These smaller hits of dopamine serve to maintain interest in the long-term goal that is being chased. I didn't have any evidence of this until I found this paper by Peter Shizgal and Andreas Arvanitogiannis from the journal Science which describes this exact behaviour in gambling: “a gradual increase in the firing rate of midbrain dopamine neurons in anticipation of uncertain rewards.”

This, then, is my proposed neurological hypothesis for the Flow state: the individual experiences a degree of arousal proportional to the perception of challenge (i.e. excitement). The challenge itself holds out the prospect of reward (i.e. a big hit of dopamine) and this anticipation releases a small amount of dopamine in a continuous flow, helping to maintain interest in the ultimate goal. The achievement of the goal state is essentially anathematic to the Flow state (which is thus inherently process-oriented) it is the pursuit of the goal which produces a steady flow of dopamine and this would then be a candidate hypothesis for the neurology of optimal experience.

The Problem of Meditation

This is a great start, but of course there are problems. The principle concern I have is integrating yogic activities with the above model – since meditation in specific (and yoga in general) occur in the absence of excitement. They are, indeed, about reaching profoundly calm states. Why is this a problem? It is because the Flow model inherently requires that when the challenge outstrips the skills, anxiety results, and when the skills outstrip the challenge, boredom results. But in meditation, neither of these happen.

An amateur in meditation or yoga does not experience anxiety when they fail to successfully meditate. They are just unable to quiet their conscious mind and may, as a result, feel bored – the opposite of what Flow theory suggests. Similarly, a master yogi does not feel bored when they fail to reach states of deep meditation – this isn't the nature of the optimal experience of meditation, in which the participant simply reaches as deep a state of mental calm as they are able.

So why should it be that meditation violates the pattern of optimal experience?

A possible answer is that Flow incorrectly conflates different mechanisms into a single mechanism. A paper by Solberg, Holen Ekeberg, Isferud, Halvorsen and Sndvik shows the neurological effects of meditation, which involves two “well-being proteins”, serotonin and melatonin – very different neurology to that I proposed above. However, studies by Andrew Newberg on Tibetan meditators show that the frontal lobe of the brain (which includes the decision centre) is highly active during meditation, while the parietal lobe – which is involved in orienting us in time and space – is largely inactive. The activation of the frontal lobe is associated with concentration, which is a condition of Flow as described by Csikszentmihalyi.

But this isn't the whole story. Kjaer, Bertelsen, Piccini, Brooks, Alving, and Lou published a paper on neurolobiological responses during Yoga Nidra meditation which demonstrated that dopamine was linked to meditation (or at least, to this one kind of meditation): this is a strange result! People who were actively reducing their desire for action (disabling what is termed the executive function of the brain – the brain areas that mediate planning and execution) experienced increased release of dopamine. If this finding applies to all forms of meditation, then perhaps there is a common element to all optimal experiences: dopamine, the “goal protein”.

The Flow Checklist

Now is a prudent time to examine Csikszentmihalyi's list of nine elements associated with the Flow state. He states that not all elements need be present for an optimal experience to occur, but these are in general the hallmarks of the experience as he describes it. Here I associate each element with an aspect of the brain or the neurotransmitter system.

Firstly, activity in the frontal lobe, which links to Csikszentmihalyi's “concentrating and focusing”, “loss of the feeling of self-consciousness”, “distorted sense of time”, “sense of personal control” and “action awareness merging”. According to my hypothesis, all Flow states involve significant activation of the frontal lobe in some way, resulting in the state of intense focus.

Secondly, the dopamine reward system, which links to Csikszentmihalyi's “clear goals”, “direct and immediate feedback”, “balance between ability level and challenge” and “intrinsically rewarding”. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with rewards, and furthermore the anticipation of uncertain reward produces small hits of dopamine. It is these small releases of dopamine which I contend are fundamental to optimal experience. In order for this to occur, the individual must always feel that the goal is achievable (which is how the “feedback” condition links to dopamine) but there also must be sufficient uncertainty that the outcome is not guaranteed (hence the “balance between ability level and challenge”). If the outcome is certain (the challenge is insufficient), boredom results – the anticipatory dopamine hits are cut off.

These two mechanisms I am contending are always involved in experience of Flow, although the relative activation of the frontal cortex versus the degree of dopamine released can be wildly different.

Finally, a third mechanism is required to explain the anxiety that occurs when the challenge outstrips ability, and this is presumably the “flight” of the fight or flight response (which I have discussed before in the context of rushgames), namely adrenalin (epinephrine) and the fear centre (amygdala) which is presumably triggered when the frontal cortex assesses the situation and concludes that the individual is out of their depth with respect to the degree of challenge. This causes the experience of anxiety. Furthermore, the experience of excitement acts to enhance the release of dopamine (which is to say, you experience more reward the more stress you were under prior to achieving the goal) thus creating a range of different Flow states according to the degree of stress associated with them.

I believe these three mechanisms are sufficient for an explanation of the neurological underpinnings of Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory. All that remains is to validate this hypothesis experimentally which I shall not be doing since I am a game designer and not an experimental researcher.

Conclusion

It is my hypothesis that Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory is explicable in terms of three neurobiological mechanisms: the frontal cortex, which mediates concentration; the pleasure centre (the nucleus accumbens), which releases dopamine in response to both the achievement of goals and the anticipation of such achievement under uncertain conditions; and the fight-or-flight mechanism, specifically the arousal produced by epinephrine (which enhances rewards) and the anxiety that results when the amygdala is activated when an individual feels out of their depth. Between these three mechanisms, all the many and various optimal experiences result.

I welcome discussion in the comments.

Don't Talk About Creationism, Or Else

Following this week's exploration of “religion” versus “science”, I’d like to conclude this theme by looking at this issue in current affairs.  

Earlier this week, Professor Michael Reiss (pictured) stepped down as director of education for the Royal Society, a prestigious learned society which serves as the academy of science in the United Kingdom. The implication of this resignation is that Professor Reiss has been forced out of his job as a result of his comments concerning creationism last week.

What were these scandalous comments? Professor Reiss suggested that rather than dismissing creationism as a “misconception” teachers should see it as a cultural “world view”, take the time to explain why creationism had no scientific basis, and added that this was more valuable than simply “banging on” about evolution. In a later interview he added:

An increasing percentage of children in the UK come from families that do not accept the scientific version of the history of the universe and the evolution of species. What are we to do with those children? My experience after having tried to teach biology for twenty years is if one simply gives the impression that such children are wrong, then they are not likely to learn much about the science that one really wants them to learn. I think a better way forward is to say to them ‘look, I simply want to present you with the scientific understanding of the history of the universe and how animals and plants and other organisms evolved.’

(Why are there an increasing number of children with creationist views? It is because of the increase in Muslim families in the UK, a proportion of which have traditional creationist beliefs. The percentage of belief in creationism in the UK has been estimated in 2006 to be about 20%; Professor Reiss suggests roughly one in ten students hold creationist beliefs).

The problem, it seems, was not the actual comments that Professor Reiss made, but the way they were reported in the media. Even the moderate BBC news coverage ran with the misleading headline “Call for creationism in science”, and the fact that Professor Reiss is a Church of England Minister as well as a biologist doubtless added to the confusion.

The media coverage inflamed the anti-creationist lobby leading, to comments like the following from Mr. Porteous Wood: “Creationism is anti-science. Teaching it to children is a form of intellectual child abuse, because it gives them the wrong facts about life.” This viewpoint clearly draws on Professor Dawkins polemic that teaching anything but ‘the correct science’ is child abuse, a position that is monstrously naïve in terms of philosophy of science, presuming that the science of any one given era can be treated as absolute truth despite the manifest evidence that scientific beliefs change over time. 

My view on this debacle is echoed in the voices of other scientists in the UK. Lord Robert Winston, professor of science and society at Imperial College London said in respect of the resignation: “I fear that in this action the Royal Society may have only diminished itself. This is not a good day for the reputation of science or scientists. This individual was arguing that we should engage with and address public misconceptions about science - something that the Royal Society should applaud.”

The chief executive of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Roland Jackson, stated: “I was at the actual discussion and what I heard him say, however it has been reported, was essentially the position advocated by the Royal Society.” He also suggested the Royal Society “should have supported him and used this opportunity to further a reasoned debate”.

All this dovetails with my position that creationism is a reasonable topic to discuss in schools when the students hold this belief, and attempting to suppress discussion is utterly counter-productive. Creationism is no longer considered a valid scientific theory, but this does not make it anti-science, and the discussion of why creationism is not a scientific theory is a legitimate scientific topic. It lays out the boundary conditions for our modern understanding of the scientific process. Similarly, phlogiston is no longer considered a valid scientific theory, but there is nothing anti-scientific about discussing phlogiston – in fact, discussing failed theories teaches far more about the scientific method than enforcing a dogmatic interpretation of science. The use of phrases like “anti-science” reveals partisan psychology at work.

Modern scientists should be sufficiently secure in their scientific beliefs to have discussions on any topic relating to science without it being a cause of cognitive dissonance. When this is not possible, the objective perspective which scientists strive to attain (but never truly can) is entirely lost, and in the absence of even the intent of objectivity the essence of the modern scientific method is obscured. Since the scientific community disagrees on so many facts, it is absurd to treat any aspect of modern scientific knowledge as dogma – when this happens, we have fallen into the nightmare of epistemic dictatorship I lampooned earlier this week in the nonsense piece about the Science Pope.

Professor Reiss’ resignation is an embarrassment to the Royal Society, whose distinguished history spans almost 350 years. When the Royal Society was founded, various forms of creationism were the dominant theories of the origin of life. To contend that these older beliefs are no longer permissible topics for discussion is to irreparably harm the credibility of the scientific endeavour, to violate its assumption of neutrality, and to radically fail to uphold the grand tradition of discussing any and all aspects of human knowledge in a spirit of open debate, upon which all scientific institutions are alleged to be founded.

Sir Isaac Newton, one of the progenitors of modern science, held views that accorded with those of the proponents of Intelligent Design, saying of the Universe: “This most beautiful system could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Holding this belief did not invalidate his scientific work, which included the publication in 1687 of the most influential book in the history of science, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. But he knew full well that future scientists would see further than him:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Today’s would-be Science Popes would do well to heed Sir Isaac’s advice that “tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.”

Top Ten Science & Religion

What are the top scientific theories? What are the top religious belief systems? For the purpose of this piece, we shall be ranking both kinds of tradition by the same criteria – the number of years that people have found them useful. We shall only consider theories and religions which are to some degree extant, and the existence of people who uphold a particular tradition (scientific or religious) shall be treated as proof of utility as a matter of expediency.

The number of years stated have been approximated and rounded for convenience, and many of the dates of origin or tracings of lineage are open to dispute.

 

Top 10 Science

Fields are listed in italics

(1) 2,500 years: Thales (and Anaxagoras), Theory of Ellipses (Astronomy)
(2) 2,400 years: Democritus, Theory of Atoms (Physics)
(3) 2,300 years: Aristarchus, Theory of Heliocentrism (Astronomy)
(4) 2,250 years: Eratosthenes, Theory of Earth’s Diameter (Geography)
(5) 1,850 years: Galen, Principles of Physiology (Biology)
(6) 1,475 years: Li Tao Yuan, Principles of Palaeontology (Biology)
(6) 1,475 years: John Philoponus, Theory of Inertia (Physics)
(8) 1,400 years: Chao Yuan Fang, Diagnosis of Disease (Biology)
(9) 1,125 years: Khindi, Experimental Method (N/A)
(10) 800 years: Maimonides, Psychosomatic Medicine (Biology)

Runners up:

(11) 600 years: Ulugh Beg, Astronomical Tables (Astronomy)
(12) 500 years: Nicolas Copernicus, Observational Astronomy (Astronomy)
(13) 450 years: William Gilbert, Electromagnetism (Physics)
(14) 400 years: Galileo Galilei, Motion of Falling Bodies (Physics)
(15) 375 years: William Harvey, Theory of Blood Circulation (Biology)

 

Top 10 Religion

Experiences are listed in italics

(1) 30,000 years: Shamanism (Panenhenic)
(2) 6,000 years: Fertility Cults e.g. Ninna in Mesopotamia (Numinous)
(3) 3,900 years: Canaanite religion/Judaism (Numinous)
(4) 3,800 years: Zoroastrianism (Numinous)
(5) 3,350 years: Vedic pantheon/Hinduism (Numinous/Contemplative)
(6) 2,950 years: Kami worship/Shinto (Panenhenic)
(7) 2,550 years: Taoism (Panenhenic)
(8) 2,525 years: Jainism (Contemplative/Numinous)
(9) 2,500 years: Confucianism (Panenhenic)
(10) 2,475 years: Buddhism (Contemplative)

Runners up:

(11) 2,000 years: Christianity (Numinous)
(12) 1,400 years: Islam (Numinous)
(13) 500 years: Sikhism (Contemplative/Numinous)
(14) 150 years: Baha’i (Numinous/Panenhenic)
(15) 50 years: Discordianism (Contemplative)

Note that many of these religions have other experiences entailed; for instance, Islam has Sufi as its contemplative form, but is primarily focussed on numinous experience. For more on religious experiences, see here.

Disagree on some point of fact or interpretation? Why not share your views in the comments!

Moving Beyond Darwin

Moving Beyond Darwin

This essay was first published six years ago in a very obscure publication. Since it has only been read by at most half a dozen people, I have decided to post it here where we might make that up to the full dozen. It's about 6,000 words, and has nothing to do with games.

I have always had the unshakeable feeling that there was something wrong with our perceptions of evolution, but since biology has been my ‘neglected science’ until recently, I haven’t really been in a position to expand my viewpoint until now.  I once said that I felt the modern view of evolution explained matters of biology as well as Newtonian physics explained the physical world.  A good friend countered that, to a reasonable degree, Newtonian Physics was a good approximation for the physical world.  Two years later and I can confidently report that Newton fudged his results to get his version of gravity accepted by the orthodox scientific community.  It is fair to say that for terrestrial engineering, Newtonian gravity suffices. 

But in evolutionary biology, where the battleground is largely ideological and not pragmatic, rigid adherence to neo-Darwinian beliefs seems less acceptable.  Science, or at least the patient, agnostic investigation of what passes for reality (which is what I hope science represents), has very little to do with what the establishment sometimes attempts to pass off as truth.

So what am I about to say?  That Darwin was Wrong?  Of course not.  He was no more Wrong than he was Right.  He had an idea, a brilliantly insightful idea, certainly, and an idea that has helped many other people have brilliant ideas.  But Darwin’s idea no more perfectly explains biological life than Pythagorus or Euclid’s ideas perfectly explained mathematics.  It was the first step on a long road.  I’m going to tell you my current view of that road on the understanding that this is just my perspective.  Walk the same path and you may well see different things.  But this is what I see.

In the beginning…

We don’t know how life began.  We probably never will know.  Likewise, we will probably never know with any certainty if terrestrial life started in pools on Earth, in the black smokers of the deep oceans, on Mars, or in the deep voids of space (all of which have been suggested by various people at one time or another).  One thing I can say with confidence is that at this point in time, all these possibilities and more are at the very least plausible.  It is fair what Lynn Margulis says, however, that moving the origin of life off the planet doesn’t get us any closer to solving the question of how life started, but frankly what little evidence we have at this time no more points to Earth than it does to space.  The origin of life remains a question of faith.

However, it seems probable that the first step towards life was some kind of self-replicating chemical construct.  Once such a chemical existed it would only be a matter of time before all available raw materials in the putative primordial soup would be converted to this replicator.  Once you have self-replicating chemicals, the way is open for more efficient replicators to develop, and certainly as time goes by, these replicators have the opportunity to become more complex.  Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel prize winner who for once almost certainly did deserve praise, showed how increasing complexity was an almost inevitable by-product of dissipative systems (such as living organisms) which means essentially that whilst the rules of thermodynamics suggest everything will fall apart, life is playing by a subtly different set of rules.

So we have our so-called prebiotic replicator, and somehow, by some mechanism, we end up with a genetic code.  Probably a whole set of different genetic codes, actually, but somewhere down the line we get DNA and RNA and the raw materials of life as we claim to know it.  Most of this early view of life is undisputed in so much that no one has anything but broad guesses as to what could or might perhaps have happened.

And here comes my first break with conventional thinking.  The establishment claims that whilst the creation of self-replicating molecules is monstrously unlikely there were enough random encounters between chemicals that it became highly likely, if not inevitable.  Fair enough, as a belief.  But one can hardly claim that such an approach is any more sound than claiming that God, Goddess, Whimsy or Magic caused the origin of these molecules, because either way the hypothesis is untestable and comes down to what you, the individual, choose to believe.

I personally believe that it makes no great shakes as to how we choose to see the ball being set in motion.  What’s far more interesting is the fact that we are here now and able to waste our time speculating about such things, if we choose to.

Unwitting Co-operation

Somehow, we get to the earliest single celled organisms.  Whatever else we can say about them (and we can’t say much with any confidence) they were good custodians to the planet.  They looked after it for four billion years without batting an eyelid, because quite frankly, the first eyelid wouldn’t evolve for quite a while.

I suppose the conventional view of this time before multi-cellular life was a host of different competing organisms, savagely fighting for the available resources and with only the strongest surviving. 
Eventually the fist single celled organisms were so advanced that they became multi-cellular and took the battle onto a whole new playing field.

Nothing could be much further from the apparent truth of the matter.

Firstly, nothing short of Divine Intervention could have created the cells from which all multi-cellular life springs using only the Darwinian mechanisms of mutation and natural selection. Even the orthodox scientific community has been forced to concede this (although like all defeats, the news is slow in travelling).  The biological requirements for multi-cellular life are such that randomly shifting nucleotides is just not enough to make the leap.  Later, we will look at just what was required to make that advance possible at a cellular level, but first we have to look further afield.

Biologists, generally speaking have been reluctant to pay attention to the atmosphere, despite the fact that nearly all life depends on it as a complex conveyor belt of raw materials.  Interestingly, geological evidence suggests that the composition of the modern atmosphere is essentially the same as it has been since the early days of life.  The reason this is so interesting is that the composition of the atmosphere, whilst apparently stable, is a long, long way from equilibrium. 

In case I am losing people’s attention, let me restate that as follows: if all life on earth was somehow made extinct, say by a drunken God, inadvertently pushing the biological self destruct button, the atmosphere would very rapidly change a very different mixture of gasses.  The only reason the atmosphere stays the way it appears to be is the action of the biosphere (and some related processes) constantly removing some gasses and pumping others into the air.

I won’t dwell on this for too long, because if you are interested you should go and read James Lovelock, who knows the material far better than I do and writes with both charm and insight.  The bottom line is that one thing that had to happen in the four billion years before multi cellular life began to flourish, was the establishment of a homeostatic control mechanism that could regulate the environment and keep it within tolestable limits.  Lovelock calls this mechanism Gaia.

The outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins calls Gaia “wrong and dangerously wrong”.  I find his attitude surprising and disappointing.  Homeostatic control mechanisms – such as that which keep your body at a constant temperature – certainly evolved in multi cellular life.  It is not at all clear to me why anyone should consider a large collection of unicellular lifeforms, to be subject to wholly different rules to multi-cellular life, except that the former has even more room to maneuver.

No one is claiming that the organisms that first came together to make Gaia were aware of how their co-operation was creating a stable environment for life.  It is merely the case that whatever helps life persist will in turn be encouraged to persist, just as implied by Darwinian natural selection.

And despite Dawkin’s protestations, the geological, atmospheric and biological evidence points unerringly towards Gaia.  Without it, even the small yet steady rise in our suns out put of radiation would have rendered the Earth a lifeless rock many aeons ago.  Without it, the build up of certain gasses would have made multi-cellular life impossible.  When Lovelock first proposed Gaia in the 70’s it was just an insightful hypothesis attempting to explain some pretty gigantic gaps in our knowledge.  Today, Gaia theory has gained a considerable degree of legitimacy.

I will take a moment to explain why this essay seems to be attacking Dawkins so resolutely. It is important to understand that the orthodox scientific community, being essentially a power block of old ideas, has surprisingly little variety in its perspective. Because of this, any one spokesman is as good as any other. Since Dawkins willingly accepts the mantle of what might be characterised as the current (or currently retiring) paradigm, I have no qualms at directing my criticisms towards him as a representative of that which will eventually pass into history. (This runs on Thomas Kuhn's proposition that all scientific paradigms eventually shift).

I should also say I have great respect for Dawkins' work; the idea  of ratcheted progress in evolution is a powerful explanatory  device, for instance. The problem in my view is his lack of  perspective. Dawkins himself admits he lacks a grounding in  philosophy, and this sadly lets him down. His concept of a meme is  a valuable metaphor, for instance, but when he writes about memes  he steps out of science and into philosophy, and his subsequent  attacks on religion are both intensely biased and quite  unreasonable.

The Earliest Communes

With Gaia in place – a huge selection of different organisms and processes that, through changes in population and similar mechanisms regulate the terrestrial environment – multi-cellular life was a possibility.  Animals, as we know them, require a high level of oxygen in the atmosphere to act as fuel for their high-octane metabolisms, but the oxygen could not be allowed to rise too high or everything not underwater would be wiped out in a spectacular conflagration the moment lightning first struck. (Oxygen is dangerous stuff - we forget this because we need a certain amount to fuel our bodies. But a culture of non-oxygen breathing creatures would probably be quite disturbed by our relationship with such a dangerous gas).

The stage was set.  But our actors were still just single cells. Hamlet one suspects would be less impressive if performed by bacteria.

SET, or Serial Endosymbiosis Theory, has struggled for acceptance for much the same reasons the Gaia theory has.  Anything that even remotely resembles holistic thinking has been anathema to the current paradigm.  However I am proud to report that all but one of SET’s claims has now been grudgingly accepted by the orthodox scientific community, and Margulis remains by her own admission stubbornly optimistic that its final (and from my perspective, least important) claim will eventually be vindicated.

It intrigues me, but does not surprise me, that Margulis has been involved in two of the scientific theories at the forefront of the new paradigm, Gaia theory and SET.  Call me a sexist if you will, but women strike me as far less likely to get trapped in the closed minded territorial tub-thumping of Neo-Darwinist fundamentalism.  I have high hopes that the near future will finally put pay to the hideous old boys club that served so effectively to keep women out of scientific research in the nineteenth century and before.

But what is SET, and why is it so important to multi cellular life?  In essence, what it claims is that the components of eukaryotic cell (those cells that make up multi-cellular life) are the product of symbiosis between single-cellular components that were to become the nucleus, the ribosomes and the mitochondria. They started out as single celled organisms in their own right and ended up inside the cells of modern life, possibly as a result of a failed attempt at digestion.

SET is practically unrefuted at this time (although the issue of whether flagella are also the result of endosymbiosis remains a live one).  Every cell in our bodies is the modern descendent of the earliest communes in existence, and just as Gaia represents macro-symbiosis, SET represents micro-symbiosis.  It is becoming more and more apparent that the history of life is not just the story of competition between differing life forms but also of co-operation.

The co-operation of the separate organisms that make up eukaryotic cells provided the raw materials for life to 'go multi', so to speak. With function differentiated inside the cell, each cellular component could become more efficient at what it did, because it could rely on its allies to carry out those tasks that it wasn’t good at.  So mitochondria concentrate on being efficient at handing energy whilst the nucleus learns how to store protein designs safely, and to co-ordinate the construction of these proteins.

Now we have a stage, some actors and (for those who choose to believe in such things) a director.  All we are missing is a script.

The Impotence of Being Earliest

The earliest multi-cellular fauna we know about are found preserved in Pre-cambrian strata and are known collectively as Ediacara. They appear essentially to be large, hollow pancakes, with very little differentiation.  We don’t know if their cells were eukaryotes (i.e. cellular communes) or not, but we do know that they didn’t last long, geologically speaking.  If they represent multi-cellular life’s first script, they are more an episode of Days of Our Lives than Hamlet.

A lot of questions remain unanswered about both this early experiment in Growing Big and the more successful experiment to follow.  I am particularly interested in how cell differentiation came about.  Without it, you couldn’t be made of bone, muscle, blood, brain and the other components that make up how you are.  Without differentiation, you would presumably be a hollow pancake just like the Ediacara.

In essence the problem is the issue of design.  There is little doubt that DNA represents the blueprint for all the proteins in an organism.  But one cannot build a house from a list of building materials.  A plan or design of some kind is required.  I am greatly troubled by my inability to find any evidence that the scientific community has taken this issue seriously.  They just seem to assume that the DNA does it somehow.  If this is the case – that the establishment view rest purely on assumption – then it is a deep embarrassment to a supposedly scientific perspective.

Informally, I was able to convince myself that it was theoretically possible for an organism’s design to spring from the result of a branching instruction, coded in the DNA implicitly.  But I could not find any evidence to support this hypothesis.  Indeed there is more evidence to support Rupert Sheldrake’s suggestion that an animals shape is controlled by morphic fields than to support the purely reductionistic approach.

Not that I am saying Sheldrake is right.  We just can’t be sure right now.  But as I once said to friend, his work is most valuable because he is asking the right questions.  Sheldrake, of course, has a very holistic perspective on biology, but many of his questions may have reductionistic answers. Indeed, elements of Sheldrake’s work appear to be explicable by epigenetic programming (a recently discovered Lamarlian inheritance mechanism).

Nonetheless, it is fair to say that Sheldrake was influential in reopening the issue of Lamarkian inheritance (the idea that changes to an organism can be passed to its offspring). In that area, his courage has been an asset to the research community, especially those outside of the narrow confines of the conventional thinking. There is now little doubt that there are Lamarkian inheritance mechanisms that supplement classical Mendellian inheritance and allow organisms a greater degree of adaptability to changes in local conditions on time scales too short for conventional evolutionary mechanisms to operate.

To return to the point in hand, it is not at all clear how organisms end up the shapes they do, and neither is it clear how the early cellular communes developed the ability to take on these shapes. The one thing that is clear is that as soon as life learnt how to do it, there was no turning back.

Lights! Cambrian! Explode!

The Cambrian explosion, as it is affectionately known, is the name for an extraordinary period of time roughly 545 million years ago. It is so named for the profusion of life that seemed to just explode onto the scene in what is (in geological terms) just a clock tick. Thanks to the infamous (to paleontologists at least) Burgess shale, we have a surprisingly detailed record of early multi-cellular life.

We will probably never know what bridges the gap between the first eukaryotic cells and the fauna found in the Burgess shale, but we can speculate. It fascinates me that there should be such variety of body plans in such a short period of geological time. It implies a rate of change vastly more rapid than any other that the fossil record points to.

Perhaps multi-cellular life occurred simultaneously from many different sources (which makes sense from the perspective of Formative Causation/morphic fields, but makes very little sense from an orthodox perspective). Perhaps the early co-ordination mechanisms were so sloppy that early organisms just couldn’t reproduce accurately, and random design was the order of the day. Perhaps some condition that triggered multi-cellular life somehow triggered the change in many different eukaryotic cells at the same time. We can only speculate.

When I first came to look at the Burgess shale, I had been told that there were a vast array of different body plans, far more than exist in the modern world, and this intrigued me, as I have always been suspicious of the apparent lack of variety in the general design of creatures. Why should bilateral symmetry be so universal, for example? (Bilateral symmetry essentially means that an organism has a line of symmetry from head to tail – which if you think about it is true of the vast majority of multi-cellular organisms that are capable of movement).

My most biologically literate friend suggested that bilateral symmetry might be an inevitable part of design for an organism that moves; ingest food at one end, excrete waste products from the other. Very convenient as you can then move towards food and away from your own waste. I would tend to agree with her, but since bilateral symmetry was already the norm by the time of the Cambrian explosion I have to be sceptical about this idea.

Given the rapidity at which bilateral symmetry became the norm (bearing in mind that there are many other ways of putting together a hypothetical organism, including radial symmetry such as in starfishes and asymmetric plans, as in plants) I have to question any appeal to Darwinian issues in the establishment of bilateral symmetry as a prevailing scheme. Dawkins might claim that bilateral symmetry represents such a good engineering solution that it was inevitable that it would predominate. But one has to ask how we know it represents such a good engineering solution, and Dawkins answer might be that it must be a good solution because it predominated so rapidly. Having reduced his reasoning to a mere tautology, we have no choice but to reject it, at least on scientific grounds.

I have met the same argument when dealing with convergent evolution in other places. The Tasmanian wolf is almost identical in design to other canines, including the domestic dog. And yet the Tasmanian wolf is a marsupial, genetically removed from dogs and their kind by such a huge degree that they are effectively not related at all. (And there are many other examples of convergent evolution, such as ichthyosaurus and dolphins). The conventional attitude seems to be that there must be a limited number of solutions to the problems of animal design and hence it is not surprising that many animals find the same solution. This is not wholly implausible, but it is entirely unsupported by any specific evidence. One might just as well say that Goddess/God/Aliens designed the genetic code to produce such similar animals for some spiritual purpose. It argument would hold about the same weight.

Someone once said to me, as I was arguing that there were important questions to be resolved regarding convergent evolution: “But convergent evolution does happen.” This is a wonderful statement, because it seems to miss the point entirely. Of course it happens. We can see that it happens. But that doesn’t put us any closer to understanding why it happens.

I have no solution to this question of bilateral symmetry, although I feel it is of some considerable relevance. If the common assumption about body designs resulting directly from DNA is validated at some future point, perhaps it will be revealed that bilateral symmetry is the most information efficient way of designing an organism that is going to move. Who can tell? For now, the issue is an open one.

The importance of the Cambrian explosion, in my opinion, is twofold. Firstly, the person who discovered the soft-bodied fauna completely missed their relevance and tried instead to classify them in terms of modern animals. One can hardly blame him. He was unable, as so many scientists are, to see his find in any terms other than those he had been taught and had lived with comfortably for so long. What a mental breakthrough it must have been to suddenly realise that what he had discovered was something that completely overturned conventional thinking on life! The Burgess shale represents a wonderful illustration of how excessive belief in currently orthodox ideas can block the acceptance of ideas that more accurately model what we choose to call reality.

Secondly, the Burgess shale represents reasonably convincing evidence that the classical Darwinian perspective of survival of the fittest is erroneous. Why? Because no-one, not even the most learned biologist, could look at the fossils of the Cambrian explosion and say with any confidence which species were destined to evolve into modern life, and which were destined for extinction.

Experts have been able to identify which species were the likely ancestors of modern life, and they look no better adapted to their environment, or superior in any other sense, to many of the other forms around at the same time. Indeed, only the tiniest fraction of the body plans around in Cambrian times survived to the modern day. And as far as we can tell, more by luck than by superior design.

The message from the Burgess shale appears to be quite straightforward. Evolution is not a record of progress (as was believed for quite some time – and indeed, is still believed in some camps) but a record of the adaptations made by various creatures to survive at various times, and who survived to the present day in part by a whole lot of luck.

Stephen Jay Gould talks of the Wheel of Fortune as a metaphor for the way that many species become extinct – extinction by lottery. Whilst some are no doubt made extinct by competition from better adapted organisms, the vast majority die out for no reason other than random chance. With this in mind, any idea of evolution as a line with single celled organisms at the bottom and man at the top (the so called "ladder of progress") is insane and ridiculous. Our position is no more privileged than any other life form around at the moment. Our chief difference seems to be that we have evolved a sense of arrogance far outstripping the rest of nature.

Where Did All the Giants Go?

I find it curious that all the truly gigantic animals have become extinct. Whale sharks and blue whales aside, modern life is practically miniaturized compared to the standards of the Mesozoic (crudely, the Dinosaur Era). We all know the Big Lad dinosaurs like tyrannosaurus rex, and apatosaurus (brontosaurus), but if you have a good look around you’ll find huge birds, giant snakes and enormous sharks have all gone by the wayside. (Megladon, a shark the size of a whale, makes the great white shark look like an anchovy by comparison).

All extinct.

Now you may wish to claim that these animals were just not efficient, or that they were out-competed or something similar. But the fact is, the environmental conditions than existed in the Mesozoic were essentially identical to modern conditions. And these creatures existed for millions of years, with substantially no changes at all if the fossil record can be believed.
Megladon teeth, for example, are one of the most abundant fossils around.

I would hazard a guess that the reason that there are no giant creatures around at the moment does not represent the superiority of ‘smaller’ animals, but merely the prevailing trend for the current conditions. People often forget that the environment that an organism adapts to is made up not only of the inanimate, but of all the animals that co-exist with it. It seems plausible to me that the web of Mesozoic life supported these giant predators, whereas our current days where speed rather than size seems to be more important cannot support such enormous animals.

But times will change. At some point, the playing field will shift again and no-one can say what will predominate when it does. This is one of the great messages of evolution, that what dominates now will likely be extinct at some future point.

Take one of my personal favourite animals, the ammonite. These nautilus-like creatures dominated the oceans in the Mesozoic, but when the Cretaceous came to an end, they, like the dinosaurs, were wiped out. I have seen no better explanation for the extinction of these shelled creatures beyond bad luck. The asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous (an event for which the geological evidence is largely in support of – the iridium deposits found in post-Cretaceous strata lack any other reasonable explanation) may well have been the cause of the mass extinction that robbed the world of the dinosaurs and the ammonite.

The ammonites gave way to the fishes. Not because the fish were superior, but because the ammonites were unlucky. That seems to be the way it goes.

This leads to the concept of punctuated equilibrium, the theory proposed by Gould and Eldredge which suggests that rather than a steady, continuous process, evolution is marked by periods of stasis (in which very little evolutionary change occurs) followed by sudden periods of change. Animals alive today owe their survival only in part to superior adaptation, and to a very great degree to being damned lucky.

After much investigation, I can only conclude that Gould and Eldredge have hit the nail on the head. At this point in time, the only arguments against punctuated equilibrium that I have heard result from trying to use classical evolutionary reasoning to explain something that now seems far more complex than simple Darwinian reasoning can deal with.

For example, a sensible complaint is that punctuated equilibrium implies evolution only takes place at certain points in time, whereas as we understand the Darwinian methods, it should be taking place constantly. This is a reasonable point to raise, and like many reasonable questions it exposes the problems in orthodox thinking.

Darwinian thinking goes something like this: organisms mutate, superior organisms thrive, inferior organisms die. Hence, evolution constantly improves organisms, adapting them to their environment. This view in the extreme is what is known as adaptionism.

However, let us take task with the first point, that organisms mutate. I am prepared to accept that there are indeed methods by which changes to organisms occur (after all, evolution is dead in the water without it). But despite the common claim, no evidence exists that new genetic variation occurs spontaneously. Although we have seen natural selection at work in our time, we have only seem selection work on genetic features that were already present.

For example, many people know about the moth that, with the advent of the industrial revolution, began to be increasingly found ‘dressed’ in black rather than its natural beige. The black moths could hide on the soot-caked trees and walls of the post-industrial world better than the beige moths, and hence had a selective advantage. However, the genes for the black colour were already present in the moth. The genes did not evolve in our time.

Indeed, there is a substantial problem with evolution by mutation, in that 99% of mutations (or more) are detrimental to an organism’s chances of survival. Most mutants die. The orthodox scientific community responds by claiming that, yes, most mutants die, but over the time scales of evolution enough mutants occur that a small number are ‘fitter’ and hence survive. There is nothing wrong with this argument, but there is no evidence for it.

Conversely, there is evidence that natural selection actually slows the rate of change in genetic material. This apparently contradictory claim was first suggested by Kimura, and has since been demonstrated to be factual. The rate of change of nucleotides in the parts of DNA which are not expressed (intron DNA) compared to those parts that are involved in coding proteins used by the animals (exon DNA) is radically different: and it is the introns ("junk DNA") which changes faster.

It actually makes a lot of sense. If most mutations are detrimental, then most changes to exon DNA will cause the creature to be inferior and hence to be less competitive than its non-mutant peers. Conversely, changes to introns produce no effect to the individual creature and hence the rate of change of sequences in intron DNA can be much faster than in exons where the watchdog of natural selection limits the amount that the code can change. It is called the Neutral theory of genetic change, and it has been broadly validated by research.

In fact, I even have a hypothesis as to what the ‘purpose’ of intron DNA might be. Viruses occasionally copy sections of DNA to different parts. Often these changes are dangerous or fatal, but at times the substitution effectively codes for a new and exciting protein. This may well have happened recently (geologically speaking) with the Antarctic cod. Genetic evidence suggests that its ‘anti-freeze’ glycoprotein occurred as a result of a transposition of intron DNA into an exon. Given that intron DNA can mutate far faster than exon DNA, it seems plausible to me that evolutionary novelty might happen as a result of intron DNA’s freedom to mutate. I call this the Cut and Paste hypothesis, but at the moment I have no way to test it. If this hypothesis is true, intron DNA is a requirement for genetic novelty.

Moving back to the central issue of punctuated equilibrium, I do not find it at all hard to accept that evolutionary change is ‘stifled’ during long periods of history. This is, after all, exactly what is shown in the fossil record. Some scientists explain the same evidence by saying that there are many other animals, but they just aren’t recorded in the fossil record. (This is a bit like saying that the accused’s finger prints are not found at the crime scene because the accused never touched anything). There are going to be gaps in the fossil record, that is unavoidable, but one cannot deny that many animals span a vast period of billions of years in the fossil record.

One can suppose that once a set of organisms have evolved into a reasonably stable set, the ‘room to maneuvre’ is so low that change can only happen on the most gradual of time frames. However, after a mass extinction, a whole new set of rules apply. The extinction of the dinosaurs and their kin made way for mammals to have a shot at being the top predators. Throughout the Mesozoic they had been tiny little scavengers, eking out an existence in between the lumbering thunder lizards. At the end of the Cretaceous, the rules changed and mammals got their turn at bat. Presumably, somewhere down the line, something will take out the mammals and give some other type of animal a chance.

It occurred to me, as I was devising the Cut and Paste hypothesis, that after a mass extinction, the pressure of natural selection should actually be reduced. With the well established predators gone (dependent as they are on the food web underneath them), organisms that previously would have been too poorly adapted to survive suddenly have a chance to show their stuff. Dawkins’ metaphorical ratchet is off, and for a brief period of time animals have far greater freedom to change.

This, for me, is quite a compelling argument towards punctuated equilibrium. Because when we look through the fossil record we find rapid change in the animals recorded in the fossils only in two types of place: one, at the boundary points representing mass extinctions (where the rules of the game were suddenly changed), and two, at the Cambrian explosion (where the rules of the game were being made up as life went along).

Changes do occur in between these times, stasis is not total, after all, and evolution still works in the long stretches of time in between. But the most radical changes to life happen in the wake of the mass extinctions, when life has a chance to make up a whole new set of rules. In our case, we’ve come into the game at a time when giant animals are no longer as effective as once they were. Who knows what the life that follows us will find?

As a final point before I put punctuated equilibrium to one side, it is worth understanding that if major changes in life can only come about by mass extinctions, then we may owe our much-vaunted intelligence in part to the fortuitous position of Jupiter and the asteroid belt, the arrangement of which causes asteroids to be thrown repeatedly into the path of the Earth. Perhaps this arrangement constitutes an ‘evolutionary pump’, shaking up the status quo frequently enough for evolution to achieve far more than it could in a state of constant stasis.

Then again, if it wasn’t for Jupiter drawing away many of the comets from the Oort cloud from the Earth’s surface, we might have impacts so frequently that life would never actually get much of an opportunity to recover from the devastation and we might have no multi-cellular life at all. We can only speculate.

And so… the Present

And so I have followed evolution from its shaky beginnings, through its questionable middles and now to its uncertain present. There are many questions that remain to be answered – more than I can adequately elucidate in a single essay. However, from careful analysis of the competing views I can only conclude the following:

Evolution consists of a large number of tools, of which mutation and natural selection represent only one perspective.

As well as the classical Darwinian and Mendellian processes, contingency seems to be a major theme of evolution, and life seems to utilize a high degree of symbiosis on both a macro and micro scale, as well as utilising other mechanisms, such as epigenetic inheritance, which we have only just begun to investigate.

It is far too premature to assume that we have found even a fraction of the answers to the questions that Darwin first raised.

I will leave you with one final thought. If you are not yet convinced of the importance of symbiosis to the history of life, consider that mammals are only able to give birth to live young by virtue of a viral invader which has integrated itself into our genetic make up. When you see a foetus develop, it is surrounded by little viral allies which do not harm the developing organism but rather have made live young a possibility by breaking the ties with the embryology of the past.

Competition may be part of life, but it is not the whole of life. Dawkins’ “selfish gene” metaphor may be a useful tool for allowing us to reason outside of the narrow confines of humanocentric thinking, but it does not follow that selfishness is the guaranteed norm. Indeed, without symbiosis, multi-cellular life simply could not exist. And I cannot help but find it ironic that whichever way you look at the “selfish gene”, life breeds out pure selfishness: any creature which cares only for itself must surely die out. Dawkins may see an organism sacrificing itself for the survival of its young as selfishness, but from the point of view of the organism I can see only altruism. An individual gene, after all, codes only for a protien and is scarcely in a position to do anything but persist if it happens to be useful.

In this, as in so many things, it comes down to which metaphors you wish to use, and how you wish to look at the problem. I now look on the current world genome – the complete set of all the different genes in use by organisms today – as a record of those genes which helped propagate life up to this point. Some of those genes may have principally benefited just an individual organism, and some may have contributed to wider mechanisms. But ultimately, all we can say about the genes in the world today is that they made it here somehow.

And what more can you say about humans other than that, somehow, we made it here.

The Positive Effects of Games

For some time now, video games have been the media whipping boy. This has been going on for perhaps twenty years now... For a short while, perhaps ten years, prior to this, tabletop role playing games filled this role - and were linked (in an utterly spurious fashion) with all manner of unpleasant incidents. One has to imagine that if we dug into the matter, there might have been a period when the media demonised TV, and before that, movies. Perhaps there will always be a form of media which is a lightning rod for people's fears.

Because games are usually in the firing line, it's always nice to see a news article which has something positive to say, such as this coverage of a recent British Medical Journal edition:

Computer games can improve children's health despite research showing excessive playing causes aggression in the young, a new study claims.

Nottingham Trent University professor Mark Griffiths said they can be a powerful distraction for youngsters undergoing painful cancer treatment. He also argues games can help develop social skills for children with attention disorders including autism. Mr Griffith's claims are made in the British Medical Journal out on Friday. The professor of gambling studies at Nottingham Trent University said more research must be done into both the positive and negative effects of gaming.

He said: "Video gaming is safe for most players and can be useful in healthcare. "Although playing video games is one of the most popular leisure activities in the world, research into its effects on players, both positive and negative, is often trivialised.

This isn't the first time positive aspects of video gaming have been cited... CESA, the Japanese Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association, has claimed that games provide a helathy outlet for aggressive tendencies (I can't find an online link to their report that works to cite, alas). Not that long ago, it was reported that playing games sharpened mental faculties. Not to mention the news that playing video games improves hand eye co-ordination necessary for keyhole surgery.

Of course, there is another side to this coin, such as the studies that link playing violent video games with aggression in children. And this underlines half of the problem - not all video games are violent, but the media perspective of games focuses on this element. Until recently, the top ten best selling games of all time contained only one violent game, GTA: Vice City at number eight. Now it probably contains two. (Admitedly this data is skewed slightly by Nintendo's captive market in the early days of the NES which inflates some of their sale figures to points above what the current market will bear).

It strikes me that there are two elements driving the disparity of representation for video games... Firstly, that so much development money is invested in violent video games that the current market for violent games is saturated. This creates the impression that 'all games are violent'. Secondly, because the marketing departments of games know how to plug such testosterone fodder, and do not seem to know how to promote anything else, the media presence of games - on TV and cinema trailers, for instance - seems to intensify this impression of games.

Although I do not advocate enforcing such a rule, it would perhaps be healthy if publishers commited to funding and promoting a certain proportion of non-violent games each year. This would diversify their portfolio of product, with sound commercial benefits, as well as potentially balancing out the public face of the industry.

That said, politicians always need scapegoats, and journalists need scandal. Games will remain in the firing line until we diversify the audience for games to the extent that they are as universal as film or TV. Or until some new form of media comes along and displaces games as the new lightning rod of outrage.

Social Machines

I was lucky enough to meet Edward Castronova when we were both speakers at an academic conference on the subject of games in Manchester... This particularly stuck in my memory as it was the first time that I met someone whose paper I had read, and whose name I remembered from the paper. Ed is one of those rarest of people, a liberal academic with a sound head on his shoulders who possesses great insight but wears it lightly. His (shared) blog, Terra Nova, was the first blog I signed up for when I started plunging into the curious world of blogging.

He recently posted a musing about machine intelligence, which can be found here. Here's an extract:

If AI is like electricity and engines, it too will dramatically change how we live. Many good things will be gained, but some good things will be surrendered, too.  We should absolutely be, if not fearful, at least prudent. We could have done cars and electricity a different way. Los Angeles did not have to turn into what it is today. We really should think about how to build intelligent machines. Hawkins does not realize that we will share society with them, and for social reasons, we need to think about how to get along.

I agree with Ed; intelligent machines (which we will probably see in our lifetimes - although I do not believe we will see human-like cognition in my lifetime) will share society along with us, and therefore will need to relate to us. After all, we get emotionally attached to cars, and they are still clearly tools. As soon as we are dealing with an ambulatory device capable of following verbal commands, we will naturally anthropomorphise, and by consequence, the machine will need to relate to us appropriately.

I've been thinking about issues such as this on and off for years. I did a Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence (slash Cognitive science) and although I enjoy science fiction yarns with hostile robots as much as the next being (especially Greg Benford's Galactic Centre sequence) I do feel there are too many academics with excessive fears about AI. Ed's approach is balanced - he merely points out that another person's reasons for dismissing fears about "the robot menace" seem unfounded in the light of the social relations between very basic AI and humans in MOGs.

If you want to see how the intelligent machines of the future will relate to us, you only need to look around at how we relate to other animal species today. Dogs all but never attack their owners, because they are fully social species and as such surrender completely to the chain of command. Intelligent machines similarly will need to be programmed to be fully social. (This is the likely implementation of the first two of Asimov's laws of robotics - which in reality are only a thought experiment, as logical statements will not be the basis of complex AI).

Similarly, I relate very well with squirrels, and indeed can sometimes be found sat in the park having them climb up onto my knees and eat nuts from my hand. They do this because they trust me, and know that I am not a threat. (Plus, of course, I am a source of easy food). They are not a fully social species, but they do not enact violence because their notion of confrontation is based upon brinkmanship, not physical harm. It does not even begin to occur to the squirrels that they could attack me and steal all the nuts from me - even though they sometimes have sufficient numbers to do so. (And if you're interested in the esoteric notion of what would happen if squirrels acquired human-like consciousness, then you should buy my obscure e-novel, Dreamtime). Their consciousness just doesn't include the notion of operating collectively for anything other than early warning of the approach of a predator.

My point is this. In principle, we have nothing to fear from intelligent machines themselves, as the mechanisms we will put in place to ensure their usefulness will inevitably assign them a very low status - lower even than the family dog, which conventionally has the lowest rung on the family ladder.

However, that does not mean we don't have something to fear from intelligent machines. I see two areas of risk. The first is the most obvious; if any foolhardy nation decides to replace soldiers with machines - a theme that is explored in my favourite anime series, Gundam Wing. However, balance of power on the global stage could and should prevent this from happening, much as the threat of mutual destruction has prevented the nuclear catastrophe that the intelligentsia believed was inevitable - the original parameters of the Drake Equation show that people in 1961 thought that nuclear-powered civilisation would last only ten years before destroying itself.

The second area of risk is more serious, and it is one we face today. Man-made viruses. That is to say, the malicious reprogramming of intelligent machines. To this, there is no real defense. As long as their are marginalised intellectuals who are improperly socialised (by, for instance, bad experiences in high school, or aggressive foreign intervention in their country) there will be people whose only source of attention is clever vandalism. Since cryptography is only ever an arms race, it seems unlikely we can protect absolutely against interference.

It follows, therefore, that it may not be appropriate for wide scale implementation of intelligent machines until we improve our social, cultural and intercultural foundations to minimise the risk of people feeling alienated. While individuals can feel alienated, can wish to cause malicious harm, all technology carries with it certain risks.