Evolving Tech and Natural Selection
Charles Darwin coined the term 'natural selection' 150 years ago to account for the variation he saw in nature during his cruise around the world in the Beagle. He saw tremendous variation but it wasn't random. The Galapagos Islands provided a unique opportunity to explore how that variation worked.
The Galapagos Islands were populated by finches. Each one had a different species of finch. Darwin noticed that the beak of each species was optimally adapted for the kind of seeds that were available on each island.
He noticed that humans had been breeding animals for thousands of years. The method is even simple if slow. The breeder rejects replicants that don't have some set of desired characteristics.
lowly the breed comes to express the desired characteristics.
This is artificial selection and it works on any life form you try it on, from dogs to fruitflies to fruit.
Darwin's genius was to realize that nature works the same way but without a human intervenor doing the selection. The selection pressure of survival does the same job. This was 'natural selection'.
Artificial selection like breeding is a kind of natural selection that has humans rather than failure to find a mate as the selector.
Natural selection can be expressed as an algorithm.
Its a feedback loop tha starts with a replicator - a thing that makes copies of itself with some variation.
Some of the variants will be better at meeting the selection pressure imposed by an environment.
Those variants will form the next generation of replicators.
As that loop continues with many iterations the replicators evolve to become better and better at meeting their selection pressure to an astonishing degree.
Dawkins realized that when a human copies a behavior from another human the behavior is being replicated. There is variation among the replicants and a selection pressure that determines which variations become replicants. He coined the word 'meme' to stand for those copied behaviors.
He wrote about memes in his book "The Selfish Gene" which was asking "Just what is the replicator that drives evolution?" Children are not copies of their parents. One might say that children are mixtures of their parents rather than copies. The actual replicants are the genes we carry in all our cells. He said that bodies are vehicles that transport genes into the future.
Given the context, genes and memes were closely related concepts. But also very different. A gene is a chemical structure. A meme is an imitated behavior. The point is that each exists because it can, not because anyone made it.
Genotypes (communities of interacting genes) can have interests that aren't aligned with the interests of phenotypes (our bodies). Personally, as an old childless bachelor, my genes probably think of me as a traitor.
Temes are a subset of the meme idea. A meme is an imitated behavior. A teme is an imitated way of solving a technical problem. When I drove cars and did my own mechanics I was very interested in the differences among cars in different countries. Each seemed to have their own 'breed' of the same species (cars).
Cars aren't that old. 120 years ago cars weren't mass produced - each was basically hand crafted. I surmise that there was a lot of imitation within each country but not as much interchange with foreign countries. In evolutionary terms this is like the Galapagos - each country evolves a car best suited to local conditions. With cars the local conditions were things like local supply chains.
Even as cars evolved mechanically the infrastructure that supported cars evolved too. We ended up with conceptual marvels like clover leaf interchanges on highways to "freeways runnin through the backyard".Now freeways in the backyard may not be a good idea from a human perspective - but it's kind of inevitable given a selfish teme perspective.
Atomic energy provides an instructive perspective. It should be a boon. But it enabled atomic bombs. Once the bomb makers saw the explosive potential and the scientists showed how to build one, atomic bombs became inevitable. To everyone's amazement, nuclear war didn't happen.
I say amazement because when I was in grade 9 during the cuban missile crisis everyone was expecting nuclear war at any moment. We did drills to shelter in the basement of the school as well as well as fire drills.
Nobody could resist the creation of nuclear weapons once it became possible. But once it was developed it became impossible to use. Nuclear weapons are not just a moral horror but they also would make human life impossible due to effects like nuclear winter and widespread radioactivity.
Temes aren't just abstract ideas - they have huge practical limitations like people not wanting to pay for them. Data centers now face a NIMBY thing. Nobody wants one in their back yard.
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.