We expect the law of gravity to be the same on Mars as on Earth because only one viable explanation of gravity is known - Einstein's general theory of relativity - and that is a universal theory; but we do not expect the map of Mars to resemble the map of Earth, because our theories about how Earth looks, despite being excellent explanations, have no reach to the appearance of any other astronomical object. Always, it is explanatory theories that tell us which (usually few) aspects of one situation can be 'extrapolated' to others.
It also makes sense to speak of the reach of non-explanatory forms of knowledge - rules of thumb, and also knowledge that is implicit in the genes for biological adaptations. So, as I said, my rule of thumb about cups-and-balls tricks has reach to a certain class of tricks; but I could not know what that class is without the explanation for why the rule works. Old ways of thought, which did not seek good explanations, permitted no process such as science for correcting errors and misconceptions.
Improvements happened so rarely that most people never experienced one. Ideas were static for long periods. Being bad explanations, even the best of them typically had little reach and were therefore brittle and unreliable beyond, and often within, their traditional applications.
It is a paradox inherent in the Principle of Mediocrity: contrary to its motivation, here it is forcing us back to an archaic, anthropocentric, pre-scientific conception of the world. At root, the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth metaphor overlap in a claim about reach: they both claim that the reach of the distinctively human way of being - that is to say, the way of problem- solving, knowledge-creating and adapting the world around us - is bounded. And they argue that its bounds cannot be very far beyond what it has already reached.
Trying to go beyond that range must lead to failure and catastrophe respectively. Both ideas also rely on essentially the same argument, namely that if there were no such limit, there would be no explanation for the continued effectiveness of the adaptations of the human brain beyond the conditions under which they evolved. Why should one adaptation out of the trillions that have ever existed on Earth have unlimited reach, when all others reach only inside the tiny, insignificant, untypical biosphere? Fair enough: all reach has an explanation.
But what if there is an explanation, and what if it has nothing to do with evolution or the biosphere? Imagine that a flock of birds from a species that evolved on one island happens to fly to another. Their wings and eyes still work. That is an example of the reach of those adaptations.
Trying to go beyond that range must lead to failure and catastrophe respectively. Both ideas also rely on essentially the same argument, namely that if there were no such limit, there would be no explanation for the continued effectiveness of the adaptations of the human brain beyond the conditions under which they evolved. Why should one adaptation out of the trillions that have ever existed on Earth have unlimited reach, when all others reach only inside the tiny, insignificant, untypical biosphere? Fair enough: all reach has an explanation.
But what if there is an explanation, and what if it has nothing to do with evolution or the biosphere? Imagine that a flock of birds from a species that evolved on one island happens to fly to another. Their wings and eyes still work. That is an example of the reach of those adaptations.
It has an explanation, the essence of which is that wings and eyes exploit universal laws of physics (of aerodynamics and optics respectively). They exploit those laws only imperfectly; but the atmospheric and lighting conditions on the two islands are sufficiently similar, by the criteria defined by those laws, for the same adaptations to work on both. Thus the birds may well be able to fly to an island many kilometres away horizontally, but if they were transported only a few kilometres upwards their wings would stop working because the density of the air would be too low.
But what if there is an explanation, and what if it has nothing to do with evolution or the biosphere? Imagine that a flock of birds from a species that evolved on one island happens to fly to another. Their wings and eyes still work. That is an example of the reach of those adaptations.
It has an explanation, the essence of which is that wings and eyes exploit universal laws of physics (of aerodynamics and optics respectively). They exploit those laws only imperfectly; but the atmospheric and lighting conditions on the two islands are sufficiently similar, by the criteria defined by those laws, for the same adaptations to work on both. Thus the birds may well be able to fly to an island many kilometres away horizontally, but if they were transported only a few kilometres upwards their wings would stop working because the density of the air would be too low.
Their implicit knowledge about how to fly fails at high altitude. A little further up, their eyes and other organs would stop working. The design of these too does not have that much reach: all vertebrate eyes are filled with liquid water, but water freezes at stratospheric temperatures and boils in the vacuum of space.
Their implicit knowledge about how to fly fails at high altitude. A little further up, their eyes and other organs would stop working. The design of these too does not have that much reach: all vertebrate eyes are filled with liquid water, but water freezes at stratospheric temperatures and boils in the vacuum of space.
Less dramatically, the birds might also die if they merely had no good night vision and they reached an island where the only suitable prey organisms were nocturnal. For the same reason, biological adaptations also have limited reach in regard to changes in their home environment - which can and do cause extinctions. If those birds' adaptations do have enough reach to make the species viable on the new island, they will set up a colony there.
In subsequent generations, mutants slightly better adapted to the new island will end up having slightly more offspring on average, so evolution will adapt the population more accurately to contain the knowledge needed to make a living there. The ancestor species of humans colonized new habitats and embarked on new lifestyles in exactly that way. But by the time our species had evolved, our fully human ancestors were achieving much the same thing thousands of times faster, by evolving their cultural knowledge instead.
That is to say, every putative physical transformation, to be performed in a given time with given resources or under any other conditions, is either - impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or - achievable, given the right knowledge. That momentous dichotomy exists because if there were transformations that technology could never achieve regardless of what knowledge was brought to bear, then this fact would itself be a testable regularity in nature.
But all regularities in nature have explanations, so the explanation of that regularity would itself be a law of nature, or a consequence of one. And so, again, everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. This fundamental connection between explanatory knowledge and technology is why the Haldane-Dawkins queerer-than-we-can- suppose argument is mistaken - why the reach of human adaptations does have a different character from that of all the other adaptations in the biosphere.
The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge - and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge. For every other species on Earth, we can determine its reach simply by making a list of all the resources and environmental conditions on which its adaptations depend.
But all regularities in nature have explanations, so the explanation of that regularity would itself be a law of nature, or a consequence of one. And so, again, everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. This fundamental connection between explanatory knowledge and technology is why the Haldane-Dawkins queerer-than-we-can- suppose argument is mistaken - why the reach of human adaptations does have a different character from that of all the other adaptations in the biosphere.
The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge - and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge. For every other species on Earth, we can determine its reach simply by making a list of all the resources and environmental conditions on which its adaptations depend.
In principle one could determine those from a study of its DNA molecules - because that is where all its genetic information is encoded (in the form of sequences of small constituent molecules called 'bases'). As Dawkins has pointed out: A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving.
We can detect devices such as lasers and radio transmitters that have been designed for the purpose of communication; and we can detect components of planetary atmospheres that could not be present in the absence of life. Thus those types of knowledge are among the most prominent phenomena in the universe. Note also that the SETI instrument is exquisitely adapted to detecting something that has never yet been detected.
Biological evolution could never produce such an adaptation. Only scientific knowledge can. This illustrates why non-explanatory knowledge cannot be universal.
Like all science, the SETI project can conjecture the existence of something, calculate what some of its observable attributes would be, and then construct an instrument to detect it. Non-explanatory systems cannot cross the conceptual gap that an explanatory conjecture crosses, to engage with unexperienced evidence or non-existent phenomena. Nor is that true only of fundamental science: if such-and-such a load were put on the proposed bridge it would collapse, says the engineer, and such statements can be true and immensely valuable even if the bridge is never even built, let alone subjected to such a load.
The knowledge in human brains and the knowledge in biological adaptations are both created by evolution in the broad sense: the variation of existing information, alternating with selection. In the case of human knowledge, the variation is by conjecture, and the selection is by criticism and experiment. In the biosphere, the variation consists of mutations (random changes) in genes, and natural selection favours the variants that most improve the ability of their organisms to reproduce, thus causing those variant genes to spread through the population.
That a gene is adapted to a given function means that few, if any, small changes would improve its ability to perform that function. Some changes might make no practical difference to that ability, but most of those that did would make it worse. In other words good adaptations, like good explanations, are distinguished by being hard to vary while still fulfilling their functions.
The knowledge in human brains and the knowledge in biological adaptations are both created by evolution in the broad sense: the variation of existing information, alternating with selection. In the case of human knowledge, the variation is by conjecture, and the selection is by criticism and experiment. In the biosphere, the variation consists of mutations (random changes) in genes, and natural selection favours the variants that most improve the ability of their organisms to reproduce, thus causing those variant genes to spread through the population.
That a gene is adapted to a given function means that few, if any, small changes would improve its ability to perform that function. Some changes might make no practical difference to that ability, but most of those that did would make it worse. In other words good adaptations, like good explanations, are distinguished by being hard to vary while still fulfilling their functions.
Human brains and DNA molecules each have many functions, but among other things they are general-purpose information-storage media: they are in principle capable of storing any kind of information. Moreover, the two types of information that they respectively evolved to store have a property of cosmic significance in common: once they are physically embodied in a suitable environment, they tend to cause themselves to remain so. Such information - which I call knowledge - is very unlikely to come into existence other than through the error-correcting processes of evolution or thought.
There are also important differences between those two kinds of knowledge. One is that biological knowledge is non-explanatory, and therefore has limited reach; explanatory human knowledge can have broad or even unlimited reach. Another difference is that mutations are random, while conjectures can be constructed intentionally for a purpose.
Nevertheless, the two kinds of knowledge share enough of their underlying logic for the theory of evolution to be highly relevant to human knowledge. In particular, some historic misconceptions about biological evolution have counterparts in misconceptions about human knowledge. So in this chapter I shall describe some of those misconceptions in addition to the actual explanation of biological adaptations, namely modern Darwinian evolutionary theory, sometimes known as 'neo-Darwinism'.
Creationism Creationism is the idea that some supernatural being or beings designed and created all biological adaptations. In other words, 'the gods did it. ' As I explained in Chapter 1, theories of that form are bad explanations.
Nevertheless, the two kinds of knowledge share enough of their underlying logic for the theory of evolution to be highly relevant to human knowledge. In particular, some historic misconceptions about biological evolution have counterparts in misconceptions about human knowledge. So in this chapter I shall describe some of those misconceptions in addition to the actual explanation of biological adaptations, namely modern Darwinian evolutionary theory, sometimes known as 'neo-Darwinism'.
Creationism Creationism is the idea that some supernatural being or beings designed and created all biological adaptations. In other words, 'the gods did it. ' As I explained in Chapter 1, theories of that form are bad explanations.
Unless supplemented by hard-to-vary specifics, they do not even address the problem - just as 'the laws of physics did it' will never win you a Nobel prize, and 'the conjurer did it' does not solve the mystery of the conjuring trick. Before a conjuring trick is ever performed, its explanation must be known to the person who invented it. The origin of that knowledge is the origin of the trick.
Unless supplemented by hard-to-vary specifics, they do not even address the problem - just as 'the laws of physics did it' will never win you a Nobel prize, and 'the conjurer did it' does not solve the mystery of the conjuring trick. Before a conjuring trick is ever performed, its explanation must be known to the person who invented it. The origin of that knowledge is the origin of the trick.
Similarly, the problem of explaining the biosphere is that of explaining how the knowledge embodied in its adaptations could possibly have been created. In particular, a putative designer of any organism must also have created the knowledge of how that organism works.
Creationism thus faces an inherent dilemma: is the designer a purely supernatural being - one who was 'just there', complete with all that knowledge - or not? A being who was 'just there' would serve no explanatory purpose (in regard to the biosphere), since then one could more economically say that the biosphere itself 'just happened', complete with that same knowledge, embodied in organisms. On the other hand, to whatever extent a creationist theory provides explanations about how supernatural beings designed and created the biosphere, they are no longer supernatural beings but merely unseen ones.
Creationism thus faces an inherent dilemma: is the designer a purely supernatural being - one who was 'just there', complete with all that knowledge - or not? A being who was 'just there' would serve no explanatory purpose (in regard to the biosphere), since then one could more economically say that the biosphere itself 'just happened', complete with that same knowledge, embodied in organisms. On the other hand, to whatever extent a creationist theory provides explanations about how supernatural beings designed and created the biosphere, they are no longer supernatural beings but merely unseen ones.
They might, for instance, be an extraterrestrial civilization. But then the theory is not really creationism - unless it proposes that the extraterrestrial designers themselves had supernatural designers. Moreover, the designer of any adaptation must by definition have had the intention that the adaptation be as it is.
But that is hard to reconcile with the designer envisaged in virtually all creationist theories, namely a deity or deities worthy of worship; for the reality is that many biological adaptations have distinctly suboptimal features. For instance, the eyes of vertebrates have their 'wiring' and blood supply in front of the retina, where they absorb and scatter incoming light and so degrade the image. There is also a blind spot where the optic nerve passes through the retina on its way to the brain.
They might, for instance, be an extraterrestrial civilization. But then the theory is not really creationism - unless it proposes that the extraterrestrial designers themselves had supernatural designers. Moreover, the designer of any adaptation must by definition have had the intention that the adaptation be as it is.
But that is hard to reconcile with the designer envisaged in virtually all creationist theories, namely a deity or deities worthy of worship; for the reality is that many biological adaptations have distinctly suboptimal features. For instance, the eyes of vertebrates have their 'wiring' and blood supply in front of the retina, where they absorb and scatter incoming light and so degrade the image. There is also a blind spot where the optic nerve passes through the retina on its way to the brain.
The eyes of some invertebrates, such as squids, have the same basic design but without those design flaws. The effect of the flaws on the efficiency of the eye is small; but the point is that they are wholly contrary to the eye's functional purpose, and so conflict with the idea that that purpose was intended by a divine designer. As Charles Darwin put it in The Origin of Species, 'On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility .
But, as I mentioned in Chapter 3, the biosphere is much less pleasant for its inhabitants than anything that a benevolent, or even halfway decent, human designer would design. In theological contexts this is known as 'the problem of suffering' or 'the problem of evil', and is frequently used as an argument against the existence of God. But in that role it is easily brushed off.
Typical defences are that perhaps morality is different for a supernatural being; or perhaps we are too limited intellectually to be able to understand how moral the biosphere really is. However, here I am concerned not with whether God exists, only with how to explain biological adaptations, and in that regard those defences of creationism have the same fatal flaw as the Haldane-Dawkins argument (Chapter 3): a world that is 'queerer than we can suppose' is indistinguishable from a world 'tricked out with magic'. So all such explanations are bad.
The central flaw of creationism - that its account of how the knowledge in adaptations could possibly be created is either missing, supernatural or illogical - is also the central flaw of pre-Enlightenment, authoritative conceptions of human knowledge. In some versions it is literally the same theory, with certain types of knowledge (such as cosmology or moral knowledge and other rules of behaviour) being spoken to early humans by supernatural beings.
Typical defences are that perhaps morality is different for a supernatural being; or perhaps we are too limited intellectually to be able to understand how moral the biosphere really is. However, here I am concerned not with whether God exists, only with how to explain biological adaptations, and in that regard those defences of creationism have the same fatal flaw as the Haldane-Dawkins argument (Chapter 3): a world that is 'queerer than we can suppose' is indistinguishable from a world 'tricked out with magic'. So all such explanations are bad.
The central flaw of creationism - that its account of how the knowledge in adaptations could possibly be created is either missing, supernatural or illogical - is also the central flaw of pre-Enlightenment, authoritative conceptions of human knowledge. In some versions it is literally the same theory, with certain types of knowledge (such as cosmology or moral knowledge and other rules of behaviour) being spoken to early humans by supernatural beings.
In others, parochial features of society (such as the existence of monarchs in government, or indeed the existence of God in the universe) are protected by taboos or taken so uncritically for granted that they are not even recognized as ideas. And I shall discuss the evolution of such ideas and institutions in Chapter 15. The prospect of the unlimited creation of knowledge in the future conflicts with creationism by undercutting its motivation.
Similarly, biologists need only have asked: how does the knowledge to construct a mouse get to those rags, and how is it then applied to transform the rags into a mouse? One attempted explanation of spontaneous generation, which was advocated by the theologian St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), was that all life comes from 'seeds', some of which are carried by living organisms and others of which are distributed all over the Earth. Both kinds of seed were created during the original creation of the world. Both could, under the right conditions, develop into new individuals of the appropriate species.
Augustine ingeniously suggested that this might explain why Noah's Ark did not have to carry impossibly large numbers of animals: most species could regenerate after the Flood without Noah's help. However, under that theory organisms are not being formed purely from non-living raw materials. That distributed kind of seed would be a life form, just as a real seed is: it would contain all the knowledge in its organism's adaptations.
So Augustine's theory - as he himself stressed - is really just a form of creationism, not spontaneous generation. Some religions regard the universe as an ongoing act of supernatural creation. In such a world, all spontaneous generation would fall under the heading of creationism.
SOCRATES: And what of the implanting of the instinct to procreate; and in the mother, the instinct to rear her young; and in the young, the intense desire to live and the fear of death? ARISTODEMUS: These provisions too seem like the contrivances of someone who has determined that there shall be living creatures. Socrates was right to point out that the appearance of design in living things is something that needs to be explained. It cannot be the 'product of chance'.
And that is specifically because it signals the presence of knowledge. How was that knowledge created? However, Socrates never stated what constitutes an appearance of design, and why. Do crystals and rainbows have it? Does the sun, or summer? How are they different from biological adaptations such as eyebrows? The issue of what exactly needs to be explained in an 'appearance of design' was first addressed by the clergyman William Paley, the finest exponent of the argument from design.
In 1802, before Darwin was born, he published the following thought experiment in his book Natural Theology. He imagined walking across a heath and finding a stone, or alternatively a watch. In either case, he imagined wondering how the object came to exist.
But even a single eye would suffice to make Paley's triumphant point - namely that the evidence of apparent design for a purpose is not only that the parts all serve that purpose, but that if they were slightly altered they would serve it less well, or not at all.
A good design is hard to vary: If the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. Merely being useful for a purpose, without being hard to vary while still serving that purpose, is not a sign of adaptation or design.
For instance, one can also use the sun to keep time, but all its features would serve that purpose equally well if slightly (or even massively) altered. Just as we transform many of the Earth's non-adapted raw materials to meet our purposes, so we also find uses for the sun that it was never designed or adapted to provide. The knowledge, in that case, is entirely in us - and in our sundials - not in the sun.
. that the ultimate designer must have had a maker'. Since that is a contradiction, the argument from design as perfected by Paley rules out the existence of an ultimate designer.
Note that this is not a disproof of the existence of God, any more than the original argument was a proof. But it does show that, in any good explanation of the origin of biological adaptations, God cannot play the role assigned by creationism. Though this is the opposite of what Paley believed he had achieved, none of us can choose what our ideas imply.
His argument has universal reach for anything that has, by his criterion, the appearance of design. As an elucidation of the special status of living things, and in setting a benchmark that explanations of knowledge-laden entities must meet if they are to make sense, it is essential to understanding the world. Lamarckism Before Darwin's theory of evolution, people had already been wondering whether the biosphere and its adaptations might have come into existence gradually.
Note that this is not a disproof of the existence of God, any more than the original argument was a proof. But it does show that, in any good explanation of the origin of biological adaptations, God cannot play the role assigned by creationism. Though this is the opposite of what Paley believed he had achieved, none of us can choose what our ideas imply.
His argument has universal reach for anything that has, by his criterion, the appearance of design. As an elucidation of the special status of living things, and in setting a benchmark that explanations of knowledge-laden entities must meet if they are to make sense, it is essential to understanding the world. Lamarckism Before Darwin's theory of evolution, people had already been wondering whether the biosphere and its adaptations might have come into existence gradually.
Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), a stalwart of the Enlightenment, was among them. They called that process 'evolution', but the meaning of the word then was different from its primary one today. All processes of gradual improvement, regardless of their mechanism, were known as 'evolution'.
This 'use-and-disuse' explanation had also been arrived at independently by Erasmus Darwin. A classic Lamarckian explanation is that giraffes, when eating leaves from trees whose lower-lying leaves were already eaten, stretched their necks to get at the higher ones. This supposedly lengthened their necks slightly, and then their offspring inherited the trait of having slightly longer necks.
Thus, over many generations, long-necked giraffes evolved from ancestors with unremarkable necks. In addition, Lamarck proposed that improvements were driven by a tendency, built into the laws of nature, towards ever greater complexity. The latter is a fudge, for not just any complexity could account for the evolution of adaptations: it has to be knowledge.
And so that part of the theory is just invoking spontaneous generation - unexplained knowledge. Lamarck might not have minded that, because, like many thinkers of his day, he took the existence of spontaneous generation for granted. He even incorporated it explicitly into his theory of evolution: he guessed that, as successive generations of organisms are forced by his law of nature to take ever more complex forms, we still see simple creatures because a continuous supply of them is formed spontaneously.
And so that part of the theory is just invoking spontaneous generation - unexplained knowledge. Lamarck might not have minded that, because, like many thinkers of his day, he took the existence of spontaneous generation for granted. He even incorporated it explicitly into his theory of evolution: he guessed that, as successive generations of organisms are forced by his law of nature to take ever more complex forms, we still see simple creatures because a continuous supply of them is formed spontaneously.
Some have considered this a pretty vision. But it bears hardly any resemblance to the facts. Its most glaring mismatch is that, in reality, evolutionary adaptations are of a wholly different character from the changes that take place in an individual during its lifetime.
The former involve the creation of new knowledge; the latter happen only when there is already an adaptation for making that change. For instance, the tendency of muscles to become stronger or weaker with use and disuse is controlled by a sophisticated (knowledge-laden) set of genes. The animal's distant ancestors did not have those genes.
Some have considered this a pretty vision. But it bears hardly any resemblance to the facts. Its most glaring mismatch is that, in reality, evolutionary adaptations are of a wholly different character from the changes that take place in an individual during its lifetime.
The former involve the creation of new knowledge; the latter happen only when there is already an adaptation for making that change. For instance, the tendency of muscles to become stronger or weaker with use and disuse is controlled by a sophisticated (knowledge-laden) set of genes. The animal's distant ancestors did not have those genes.
Lamarckism cannot possibly explain how the knowledge in them was created. If you were starved of vitamin C, your defective vitamin-C-synthesis gene would not thereby be caused to improve - unless, perhaps, you are a genetic engineer. If a tiger is placed in a habitat in which its colouration makes it stand out more instead of less, it takes no action to change the colour of its fur, nor would that change be inherited if it did.
That is because nothing in the tiger 'knows' what the stripes are for. So how would any Lamarckian mechanism have 'known' that having fur that was a tiny bit more striped would slightly improve the animal's food supply? And how would it have 'known' how to synthesize pigments, and to secrete them into the fur, in such a way as to produce stripes of a suitable design? The fundamental error being made by Lamarck has the same logic as inductivism.
Both assume that new knowledge (adaptations and scientific theories respectively) is somehow already present in experience, or can be derived mechanically from experience. But the truth is always that knowledge must be first conjectured and then tested. That is what Darwin's theory says: first, random mutations happen (they do not take account of what problem is being solved); then natural selection discards the variant genes that are less good at causing themselves to be present again in future generations.
Neo-Darwinism The central idea of neo-Darwinism is that evolution favours the genes that spread best through the population. There is much more to this idea than meets the eye, as I shall explain. A common misconception about Darwinian evolution is that it maximizes 'the good of the species'.
But, as the above thought experiment illustrates, that is not the case either. Not only has the species been harmed by this evolutionary change, every individual bird has been harmed as well: the birds using any particular site now have a harsher life than before, because they are using it earlier in the year. Thus, although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress.
What exactly has the evolution of those birds achieved during that period? It has optimized not the functional adaptation of a variant gene to its environment - the attribute that would have impressed Paley - but the relative ability of the surviving variant to spread through the population. An April-nesting gene is no longer able to propagate itself to the next generation, even though it is functionally the best variant. The early-nesting gene that replaced it may still be tolerably functional, but it is fittest for nothing except preventing variants of itself from procreating.
From the point of view of both the species and all its members, the change brought about by this period of its evolution has been a disaster. But evolution does not 'care' about that. It favours only the genes that spread best through the population.
I shall say more about memes in Chapter 15. The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo- Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated. This is a surprisingly deep truth which is commonly criticized either for being too obvious to be worth stating or for being false.
The reason, I think, is that, although it is self-evidently true, it is not self-evidently the explanation of specific adaptations. Our intuition prefers explanations in terms of function or purpose: what does a gene do for its holder, or for its species? But we have just seen that the genes generally do not optimize such functionality. So the knowledge embodied in genes is knowledge of how to get themselves replicated at the expense of their rivals.
Genes often do this by imparting useful functionality to their organism, and in those cases their knowledge incidentally includes knowledge about that functionality. Functionality, in turn, is achieved by encoding, into genes, regularities in the environment and sometimes even rule-of-thumb approximations to laws of nature, in which case the genes are incidentally encoding that knowledge too. But the core of the explanation for the presence of a gene is always that it got itself replicated more than its rival genes.
Those records could be translated back into DNA strands and implanted in different animals. The only reason this is not yet a common practice is that it is easier to copy the original gene. But one day the genes of a rare species could survive its extinction by causing themselves to be stored on a computer and then implanted into a cell of a different species.
I say 'causing themselves to be stored' because the biotechnologists would not be recording information indiscriminately, but only information that met a criterion such as 'gene of an endangered species'. The ability to interest biotechnologists in this way would then be part of the reach of the knowledge in those genes. So, both human knowledge and biological adaptations are abstract replicators: forms of information which, once they are embodied in a suitable physical system, tend to remain so while most variants of them do not.
The fact that the principles of neo-Darwinist theory are, from a certain perspective, self-evident has itself been used as a criticism of the theory. For instance, if the theory must be true, how can it be testable? One reply, often attributed to Haldane, is that the whole theory would be refuted by the discovery of a single fossilized rabbit in a stratum of Cambrian rock. However, that is misleading.
Given the supposed evidence, that is still an infinitely better explanation than, for instance, creationism or Lamarckism, neither of which gives any account of the origin of the apparent knowledge in the rabbit. So what would refute the Darwinian theory of evolution? Evidence which, in the light of the best available explanation, implies that knowledge came into existence in a different way. For instance, if an organism was observed to undergo only (or mainly) favourable mutations, as predicted by Lamarckism or spontaneous generation, then Darwinism's 'random variation' postulate would be refuted.
If organisms were observed to be born with new, complex adaptations - for anything - of which there were no precursors in their parents, then the gradual-change prediction would be refuted and so would Darwinism's mechanism of knowledge-creation. If an organism was born with a complex adaptation that has survival value today, yet was not favoured by selection pressure in its ancestry (say, an ability to detect and use internet weather forecasts to decide when to hibernate), then Darwinism would again be refuted. A fundamentally new explanation would be needed.
Facing more or less the same unsolved problem that Paley and Darwin faced, we should have to set about finding an explanation that worked. Fine-tuning The physicist Brandon Carter calculated in 1974 that if the strength of the interaction between charged particles were a few per cent smaller, no planets would ever have formed and the only condensed objects in the universe would be stars; and if it were a few per cent greater, then no stars would ever explode, and so no elements other than hydrogen and helium would exist outside them.
They are easily interchangeable with each other or with variants of themselves, and they are 'too easy' as explanations: they could equally well explain anything. But neo-Darwinism was not easy to come by, and it is not easy to tweak. Try to tweak it - even as far as Darwin's own misconceptions - and you will get an explanation that doesn't work nearly as well.
Try to account for something non-Darwinian with it - such as a new, complex adaptation of which there were no precursors in the organism's parents - and you will not be able to think of a variant with that feature. Anthropic explanations are attempting to account for purposeful structure (such as the fine-tuned constants) in terms of a single act of selection. That is unlike evolution, and it cannot work.
The solution of the fine-tuning puzzle is going to be in terms of an explanation that will specifically explain what we observe. It will be, as Wheeler put it, 'an idea so simple . .
. we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?' In other words, the problem has been not that the world is so complex that we cannot understand why it looks as it does, but it is that it is so simple that we cannot yet understand it. But this will be noticeable only with hindsight.
All those bad explanations of the biosphere either fail to address the problem of how the knowledge in adaptations is created or they explain it badly. That is to say, they all underrate creation - and, ironically, the theory that underrates creation most of all is creationism. Consider this: if a supernatural creator were to have created the universe at the moment when Einstein or Darwin or any great scientist (appeared to have) just completed their major discovery, then the true creator of that discovery (and of all earlier discoveries) would have been not that scientist but the supernatural being.
So such a theory would deny the existence of the only creation that really did take place in the genesis of that scientist's discoveries. And it really is creation. Before a discovery is made, no predictive process could reveal the content or the consequences of that discovery.
Replicator An entity that contributes causally to its own copying. Neo-Darwinism Darwinism as a theory of replicators, without various misconceptions such as 'survival of the fittest'. Meme An idea that is a replicator.
Memeplex A group of memes that help to cause each other's replication. Spontaneous generation Formation of organisms from non-living precursors. Lamarckism A mistaken evolutionary theory based on the idea that biological adaptations are improvements acquired by an organism during its lifetime and then inherited by its descendants.
Fine-tuning If the constants or laws of physics were slightly different, there would be no life. Anthropic explanation 'It is only in universes that contain intelligent observers that anyone wonders why the phenomenon in question happens. ' ENCOUNTERED IN THIS CHAPTER - Evolution.
Fine-tuning If the constants or laws of physics were slightly different, there would be no life. Anthropic explanation 'It is only in universes that contain intelligent observers that anyone wonders why the phenomenon in question happens. ' ENCOUNTERED IN THIS CHAPTER - Evolution.
- More generally, the creation of knowledge. The evolution of biological adaptations and the creation of human knowledge share deep similarities, but also some important differences. The main similarities: genes and ideas are both replicators; knowledge and adaptations are both hard to vary.
The main difference: human knowledge can be explanatory and can have great reach; adaptations are never explanatory and rarely have much reach beyond the situations in which they evolved. False explanations of biological evolution have counterparts in false explanations of the growth of human knowledge. For instance, Lamarckism is the counterpart of inductivism.
- More generally, the creation of knowledge. The evolution of biological adaptations and the creation of human knowledge share deep similarities, but also some important differences. The main similarities: genes and ideas are both replicators; knowledge and adaptations are both hard to vary.
The main difference: human knowledge can be explanatory and can have great reach; adaptations are never explanatory and rarely have much reach beyond the situations in which they evolved. False explanations of biological evolution have counterparts in false explanations of the growth of human knowledge. For instance, Lamarckism is the counterpart of inductivism.
William Paley's version of the argument from design clarified what does or does not have the 'appearance of design' and hence what cannot be explained as the outcome of chance alone - namely hard-to-vary adaptation to a purpose. The origin of this must be the creation of knowledge. Biological evolution does not optimize benefits to the species, the group, the individual or even the gene, but only the ability of the gene to spread through the population.
The main difference: human knowledge can be explanatory and can have great reach; adaptations are never explanatory and rarely have much reach beyond the situations in which they evolved. False explanations of biological evolution have counterparts in false explanations of the growth of human knowledge. For instance, Lamarckism is the counterpart of inductivism.
William Paley's version of the argument from design clarified what does or does not have the 'appearance of design' and hence what cannot be explained as the outcome of chance alone - namely hard-to-vary adaptation to a purpose. The origin of this must be the creation of knowledge. Biological evolution does not optimize benefits to the species, the group, the individual or even the gene, but only the ability of the gene to spread through the population.
Such benefits can nevertheless happen because of the universality of laws of nature and the reach of some of the knowledge that is created. The 'fine-tuning' of the laws or constants of physics has been used as a modern form of the argument from design. For the usual reasons, it is not a good argument for a supernatural cause.
Nevertheless, scientific discovery is a gradual process too; it is just that, in science, all the gradualness, and nearly all the criticism and rejection of bad explanations, takes place inside the scientists' minds. As Popper put it, 'We can let our theories die in our place. ' There is another, even more important, advantage in that ability to criticize theories without staking one's life on them.
In an evolving species, the adaptations of the organisms in each generation must have enough functionality to keep the organism alive, and to pass all the tests that they encounter in propagating themselves to the next generation. In contrast, the intermediate explanations leading a scientist from one good explanation to the next need not be viable at all. The same is true of creative thought in general.
This is the fundamental reason that explanatory ideas are able to escape from parochialism, while biological evolution, and rules of thumb, cannot. That brings me to the main subject of this chapter: abstractions. In Chapter 4 I remarked that pieces of knowledge are abstract replicators that 'use' (and hence affect) organisms and brains to get themselves replicated.
Explaining how an AI program works in detail might well be intractably complicated. In practice the author's explanation would always be at some emergent, abstract level. But that would not prevent it from being a good explanation.
It would not have to account for the specific computational steps that composed a joke, just as the theory of evolution does not have to account for why every specific mutation succeeded or failed in the history of a given adaptation. It would just explain how it could happen, and why we should expect it to happen, given how the program works. If that were a good explanation, it would convince us that the joke - the knowledge in the joke - originated in the program and not in the programmer.
Thus the very same utterance by the program - the joke - can be either evidence that it is not thinking or evidence that it is thinking depending on the best available explanation of how the program works. The nature of humour is not very well understood, so we do not know whether general-purpose thinking is required to compose jokes. So it is conceivable that, despite the wide range of subject matter about which one can joke, there are hidden connections that reduce all joke making to a single narrow function.
For the former, the knowledge to achieve all the available muscle strengths must already be present in the individual's genes before the sequence of changes begins. (And so must the knowledge of how to recognize the circumstances under which to make the changes. ) This is exactly the analogue of a 'trick' that a programmer has built into a chatbot: the chatbot responds 'as though' it had created some of the knowledge while composing its response, but in fact all the knowledge was created earlier and elsewhere.
The analogue of evolutionary change in a species is creative thought in a person. The analogue of the idea that AI could be achieved by an accumulation of chatbot tricks is Lamarckism, the theory that new adaptations could be explained by changes that are in reality just a manifestation of existing knowledge. There are several current areas of research in which that same misconception is common.
In chatbot-based AI research it sent the whole field down a blind alley, but in other fields it has merely caused researchers to attach overambitious labels to genuine, albeit relatively modest, achievements. One such area is artificial evolution. Recall Edison's idea that progress requires alternating 'inspiration' and 'perspiration' phases, and that, because of computers and other technology, it is increasingly becoming possible to automate the perspiration phase.
For one thing, some of the knowledge that you packed into that language during those many months of design will have reach, because it encoded some general truths about the laws of geometry, mechanics and so on. For another, when designing the language you had constantly in mind what sorts of abilities it would eventually be used to express.
The Turing-test idea makes us think that, if it is given enough standard reply templates, an Eliza program will automatically be creating knowledge; artificial evolution makes us think that if we have variation and selection, then evolution (of adaptations) will automatically happen. But neither is necessarily so. In both cases, another possibility is that no knowledge at all will be created during the running of the program, only during its development by the programmer.
One thing that always seems to happen with such projects is that, after they achieve their intended aim, if the 'evolutionary' program is allowed to run further it produces no further improvements. This is exactly what would happen if all the knowledge in the successful robot had actually come from the programmer, but it is not a conclusive critique: biological evolution often reaches 'local maxima of fitness'. Also, after attaining its mysterious form of universality, it seemed to pause for about a billion years before creating any significant new knowledge.
As many as you like. If the robot ever walks better than it did originally, then I am mistaken. If it continues to improve after that, then I am very much mistaken.
One of the main features of the above experiment, which is lacking in the usual way of doing artificial evolution, is that, for it to work, the language (of subroutines) would have to evolve along with the adaptations that it was expressing. This is what was happening in the biosphere before that jump to universality that finally settled on the DNA genetic code. As I said, it may be that all those previous genetic codes were only capable of coding for a small number of organisms that were all rather similar.
And that the overwhelmingly rich biosphere that we see around us, created by randomly varying genes while leaving the language unchanged, is something that became possible only after that jump. We do not even know what kind of universality was created there. So why should we expect our artificial evolution to work without it? I think we have to face the fact, both with artificial evolution and with AI, that these are hard problems.
So the criterion that was evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations; and the flowers' design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it. Thus both the criterion and the means of meeting it had to be hard to vary. When genes are facing a similar problem within a species, notably in the co-evolution of criteria and characteristics for choosing mates, they already have a large amount of shared genetic knowledge to draw on.
For instance, even before any such co-evolution begins, the genome may already contain adaptations for recognizing fellow members of the species, and for detecting various attributes of them. Moreover, the attributes that a mate is searching for may initially be objectively useful ones - such as neck length in a giraffe. One theory of the evolution of giraffe necks is that it began as an adaptation for feeding, but then continued through sexual selection.
However, there is no such shared knowledge to build on across the gap between distant species. They are starting from scratch. And therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard-to- emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty.
Just as the basic theory of genes was developed long before the discovery of DNA, so today, without knowing how ideas are stored in brains, we do know that some ideas can be passed from one person to another and affect people's behaviour. Memes are those ideas. Another line of criticism is that memes, unlike genes, are not stored in identical physical forms in every holder.
But, as I shall explain, that does not necessarily make it impossible for memes to be transmitted 'faithfully' in the sense that matters for evolution. It is indeed meaningful to think of memes as retaining their identity as they pass from one holder to the next. Just as genes often work together in groups to achieve what we might think of as a single adaptation, so there are memeplexes consisting of several ideas which can, alternatively, be thought of as a single more complex idea, such as quantum theory or neo-Darwinism.
So it does not matter if we refer to a memeplex as a meme, just as it does not matter if we refer to quantum theory as a single theory or a group of theories. However, ideas, including memes, cannot be indefinitely analysed into sub-memes, because there comes a point where replacing a meme by part of itself would result in its not being copied.
Like genes, all memes contain knowledge (often inexplicit) of how to cause their own replication. This knowledge is encoded in strands of DNA or remembered by brains respectively. In both cases, the knowledge is adapted to causing itself to be replicated: it causes that more reliably than nearly all its variants do.
In both cases, this adaptation is the outcome of alternating rounds of variation and selection. However, the logic of the copying mechanism is very different for genes and memes. In organisms that reproduce by dividing, either all the genes are copied into the next generation or (if the individual fails to reproduce) none are.
In sexual reproduction, a full complement of genes randomly chosen from both parents is copied, or none are. In all cases, the DNA duplication process is automatic: genes are copied indiscriminately. One consequence is that some genes can be replicated for many generations without ever being 'expressed' (causing any behaviour) at all.
She regards it instead as meme evolution. She cites the historian George Basalla, whose book The Evolution of Technology denies 'the myth of the heroic inventor'. But that distinction between 'evolution' and 'heroic inventors' as being the agents of discovery makes sense only in a static society.
There, most change is indeed brought about in the way that I guessed jokes might evolve, with no great creativity being exercised by any individual participant. But in a dynamic society, scientific and technological innovations are generally made creatively. That is to say, they emerge from individual minds as novel ideas, having acquired significant adaptations inside those minds.
Of course, in both cases, ideas are built from previous ideas by a process of variation and selection, which constitutes evolution. But when evolution takes place largely within an individual mind, it is not meme evolution. It is creativity by a heroic inventor.
What use was creativity? Of all the countless biological adaptations that have evolved on our planet, creativity is the only one that can produce scientific or mathematical knowledge, art or philosophy. Through the resulting technology and institutions, it has had spectacular physical effects - most noticeably near human habitations, but also further afield: a substantial portion of the Earth's land area is now used for human purposes.
Human choice - itself a product of creativity - determines which other species to exclude and which to tolerate or cultivate, which rivers to divert, which hills to level, and which wildernesses to preserve. In the night sky, a bright, fast-moving spot may well be a space station carrying humans higher and faster than any biological adaptation can carry anything. Or it may be a satellite through which humans communicate across distances that biological communication has never spanned, using phenomena such as radio waves and nuclear reactions, which biology has never harnessed.
What use was creativity? Of all the countless biological adaptations that have evolved on our planet, creativity is the only one that can produce scientific or mathematical knowledge, art or philosophy. Through the resulting technology and institutions, it has had spectacular physical effects - most noticeably near human habitations, but also further afield: a substantial portion of the Earth's land area is now used for human purposes.
Human choice - itself a product of creativity - determines which other species to exclude and which to tolerate or cultivate, which rivers to divert, which hills to level, and which wildernesses to preserve. In the night sky, a bright, fast-moving spot may well be a space station carrying humans higher and faster than any biological adaptation can carry anything. Or it may be a satellite through which humans communicate across distances that biological communication has never spanned, using phenomena such as radio waves and nuclear reactions, which biology has never harnessed.
The unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world. Nowadays that includes the experience of rapid innovation. By the time you read these words, the computer on which I am writing them will be obsolete: there will be functionally better computers that will require less human effort to build.
Moreover, during the period when creativity was evolving, the ability to replicate memes was evolving too. It is believed that some members of the species Homo erectus living 500,000 years ago knew how to make camp fires. That knowledge was in their memes, not in their genes.
And, once creativity and meme transmission are both present, they greatly enhance each other's evolutionary value, for then anyone who improves something also has the means to bequeath the innovation to all future generations, thus multiplying the benefit to the relevant genes. And memes can be improved much faster by creativity than by random trial and error. Since there is no upper limit to the value of ideas, the conditions would have been there for a runaway co- evolution between the two adaptations: creativity and the ability to use memes.
Yet, again, there is something wrong with that scenario. The two adaptations presumably did co-evolve, but the driving force behind that evolution cannot have been that people were improving on ideas and passing the improvements on to their children, because, again, if they had been, they would have been making cumulative improvements on a timescale of generations. Before the beginning of agriculture, about 12,000 years ago, many thousands of years passed between noticeable changes.
And, once creativity and meme transmission are both present, they greatly enhance each other's evolutionary value, for then anyone who improves something also has the means to bequeath the innovation to all future generations, thus multiplying the benefit to the relevant genes. And memes can be improved much faster by creativity than by random trial and error. Since there is no upper limit to the value of ideas, the conditions would have been there for a runaway co- evolution between the two adaptations: creativity and the ability to use memes.
Yet, again, there is something wrong with that scenario. The two adaptations presumably did co-evolve, but the driving force behind that evolution cannot have been that people were improving on ideas and passing the improvements on to their children, because, again, if they had been, they would have been making cumulative improvements on a timescale of generations. Before the beginning of agriculture, about 12,000 years ago, many thousands of years passed between noticeable changes.
It is as though each small genetic improvement in creativity produced just one noticeable innovation and then nothing more - rather like today's experiments in 'artificial evolution'. But how can that be? Unlike present-day artificial-evolution and AI research, our ancestors were evolving real creativity, which is the capacity to create an endless stream of innovations. Their ability to innovate was increasing rapidly, but they were barely innovating.
Why did tiny improvements in that ability keep spreading rapidly through the population? Our ancestors must have been using their creativity - and using it to its limits, and frequently - for something. But evidently not for innovation. What else could it have been used for? One theory is that it did not evolve to provide any functional advantage, but merely through sexual selection: people used it to create displays to attract mates - colourful clothing, decorations, story-telling, wit and the like.
A preference to mate with the individuals with the most creative displays co-evolved with the creativity to meet that preference in an evolutionary spiral - so the theory goes - just like peahens' preferences and peacocks' tails. But creativity is an unlikely target for sexual selection. It is a sophisticated adaptation which, to this day, we are unable to reproduce artificially.
So it is presumably much harder to evolve than attributes like coloration or the size and shape of body parts - some of which, it is thought, did indeed evolve by sexual selection in humans and many other animals. Creativity, as far as we know, evolved only once. Moreover, its most visible effects are cumulative: it would be hard to detect small differences in the creativity of potential mates on any one occasion, especially if that creativity was not being used for practical purposes.
These are neurons that fire when an animal performs a given action, and also when the animal perceives the same action being performed by another. These neurons have been identified experimentally in animals that have the capacity to imitate. Scientists who believe that human meme replication is a sophisticated form of imitation tend to believe that mirror neurons are a key to understanding all sorts of functions of the human mind.
Unfortunately, that cannot possibly be so. It is not known why parroting evolved. It is a fairly common adaptation in birds, and may play more than one role.
But, whatever the reason, the important thing for present purposes is that parrots never have a choice about which sounds to imitate, or about what constitutes imitating them. A ringing doorbell and a barking dog may happen to provide conditions that meet the inborn criterion that initiates parroting behaviour, and, when they do, the parrot will always mimic exactly the same aspects of them: their sounds. So, it resolves the infinite ambiguity by making no choices.
But since the easiest way for evolution to do that was to give us a universal ability to explain, through creativity, that is what it did. This epistemological fact provides not only the solution of the two puzzles I mentioned, but also the reason for the evolution of human creativity - and therefore the human species - in the first place. It must have happened something like this.
In early pre-human societies, there were only very simple memes - the kind that apes now have, though perhaps with a wider repertoire of copiable elementary behaviours. Those memes were about practical things like how to get food that was otherwise inaccessible. The value of such knowledge must have been high, so this created a ready-made niche for any adaptation that would reduce the effort required to replicate memes.
Creativity was the ultimate adaptation to fill that niche. As it increased, further adaptations co-evolved, such as an increase in memory capacity (to store more memes), finer motor control, and specialized brain structures for dealing with language. As a result, the meme band- width (the amount of memetic information that could be passed from each generation to the next) increased too.
In early pre-human societies, there were only very simple memes - the kind that apes now have, though perhaps with a wider repertoire of copiable elementary behaviours. Those memes were about practical things like how to get food that was otherwise inaccessible. The value of such knowledge must have been high, so this created a ready-made niche for any adaptation that would reduce the effort required to replicate memes.
Creativity was the ultimate adaptation to fill that niche. As it increased, further adaptations co-evolved, such as an increase in memory capacity (to store more memes), finer motor control, and specialized brain structures for dealing with language. As a result, the meme band- width (the amount of memetic information that could be passed from each generation to the next) increased too.
Memes also became more complex and sophisticated. This is why and how our species evolved, and why it evolved rapidly - at first. Memes gradually came to dominate our ancestors' behaviour.
We do not know what was being gradually increased in that approach to a universal explainer. If we did, we could program one tomorrow. The future of creativity Before Blackmore and others realized the significance of memes in human evolution, all sorts of root causes had been suggested for what propelled a normal-looking lineage of apes into rapidly becoming a species that can explain and control the universe.
Some proposed that it was the adaptation of walking upright, which freed the front limbs, with their opposable thumbs, to specialize in manipulation. Some proposed that climate change favoured adaptations that would make our ancestors more able to exploit diverse habitats. And, as I have mentioned, sexual selection is always a candidate for explaining rapid evolution.
Then there is the 'Machiavellian hypothesis' that human intelligence evolved in order to predict the behaviour of others, and to fool them. There is also the hypothesis that human intelligence is an enhanced version of the apes' aping adaptation - which, as I have argued, could not be true. Nevertheless, Blackmore's 'meme machine' idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true.
Some proposed that it was the adaptation of walking upright, which freed the front limbs, with their opposable thumbs, to specialize in manipulation. Some proposed that climate change favoured adaptations that would make our ancestors more able to exploit diverse habitats. And, as I have mentioned, sexual selection is always a candidate for explaining rapid evolution.
Then there is the 'Machiavellian hypothesis' that human intelligence evolved in order to predict the behaviour of others, and to fool them. There is also the hypothesis that human intelligence is an enhanced version of the apes' aping adaptation - which, as I have argued, could not be true. Nevertheless, Blackmore's 'meme machine' idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true.
The reason it must be true is that, whatever had set off the evolution of any of those attributes, creativity would have had to evolve as well. For no human-level mental achievements would be possible without human-type (explanatory) memes, and the laws of epistemology dictate that no such memes are possible without creativity. Not only is creativity necessary for human meme replication, it is also sufficient.
The reason it must be true is that, whatever had set off the evolution of any of those attributes, creativity would have had to evolve as well. For no human-level mental achievements would be possible without human-type (explanatory) memes, and the laws of epistemology dictate that no such memes are possible without creativity. Not only is creativity necessary for human meme replication, it is also sufficient.
Deaf people and blind people and paralysed people are still able to acquire and create human ideas to a more or less full extent. Hence, neither upright walking nor fine motor control nor the ability to parse sounds into words nor any of those other adaptations, though they might have played a role historically in creating the conditions for human evolution, were functionally necessary to allow humans to become creative. Nor, therefore, are they philosophically significant in understanding what humans are today, namely people: creative, universal explainers.
It was specifically creativity that made the difference between ape memes - expensive in terms of the time and effort required to replicate them, and inherently limited in the knowledge that they were capable of expressing - and human memes, which are efficiently transmitted and universal in their expressive power. The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity. We have no way of telling, at present, how likely it was for creativity to begin to evolve in apes.
It was specifically creativity that made the difference between ape memes - expensive in terms of the time and effort required to replicate them, and inherently limited in the knowledge that they were capable of expressing - and human memes, which are efficiently transmitted and universal in their expressive power. The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity. We have no way of telling, at present, how likely it was for creativity to begin to evolve in apes.
But, once it began to, there would automatically have been evolutionary pressure for it to continue, and for other meme-facilitating adaptations to follow in its wake. This increase must have continued through all the static societies of prehistory. The horror of static societies, which I described in the previous chapter, can now be seen as a hideous practical joke that the universe played on the human species.
Our creativity, which evolved in order to increase the amount of knowledge that we could use, and which would immediately have been capable of producing an endless stream of useful innovations as well, was from the outset prevented from doing so by the very knowledge - the memes - that that creativity preserved. The strivings of individuals to better themselves were, from the outset, perverted by a superhumanly evil mechanism that turned their efforts to exactly the opposite end: to thwart all attempts at improvement; to keep sentient beings locked in a crude, suffering state for eternity.