Competing for Consciousness: by William Calvin

[Diane]

Competing for Consciousness:A Darwinian Mechanism at an Appropriate Level of Explanation (http://williamcalvin.com/1990s/1998JConscStudies.htm)

Really interesting article, by William Calvin (http://williamcalvin.com/index.htm), who says in his site, "Though, from departmental affiliations, you'd think that I used to be a neurosurgeon, but am now a psychiatrist, I'm really a neurophysiologist, a Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics with a long association with clinicians and biologists."

The article delves into density of synapses and close proximity firing patterns. At the end are links to more of his articles on evolution of consciousness.

I discovered Calvin by looking up other bloggers interested in evolution, and he was in the list. I've acquired a few of his books, including his recommendations regarding the Franz De Waal books on bonobos (http://www.williamcalvin.com/teaching/bonobo.htm).

[Diane]

Here is another, "The Six Essentials (http://williamcalvin.com/1990s/1997JMemetics.htm): Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality."

Abstract: Selectionism emphasizes carving patterns, memes remind us of minimal replicable patterns, but a full-fledged Darwinian process needs six essential ingredients to keep going, to recursively bootstrap quality from rude beginnings. While there may be situations ("sparse Darwinism") in which a reduced number suffice, another five ingredients, while not essential, greatly enhance the speed and stability of a Darwinian process. While our best examples are drawn from species evolution, the immune response, and evolutionary epistemology, the Darwinian process may well be a major law of the universe, right up there with chemical bonds as a prime generator of interesting combinations that discover stratified stabilities.

The article is long but very engaging, so don't be afraid to read the whole thing.
Here are the 6:
1. There must be a pattern involved.

2. The pattern must be copied somehow (indeed, that which is copied may serve to define the pattern). [Together, 1 and 2 are the minimum replicable unit -- so, in a sense, we could reduce six essentials to five. But I'm splitting rather than lumping here because so many "sparse Darwinian" processes exhibit a pattern without replication.]

3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance -- though it need not be purely random, as another process could well bias the directionality of the small sidesteps that result. Superpositions and recombinations will also suffice.

4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space. For example, bluegrass and crab grass compete for back yards. Limited means the workspace forces choices, unlike a wide-open niche with enough resources for all to survive. Observe that we're now talking about populations of a pattern, not one at a time.

5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment: for example, how often the grass is watered, cut, fertilized, and frozen, giving one pattern more of the lawn than another. That's Darwin's natural selection.

6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns. In biology, there is a skewed survival to reproductive maturity (environmental selection is mostly juvenile mortality) or a skewed distribution of those adults who successfully mate (sexual selection). This is what Darwin later called an inheritance principle. Variations are not just random jumps from some standard starting position; rather, they are usually little sidesteps from a pretty-good solution (most variants are worse than a parent, but a few may be even better, and become the preferred source of further variants).

He adds a further five which he says although they aren't essential, are accelerators:

Nonessentials: Catalysts and Stabilizers

There are another five features that, while not essential, do notably influence the rate of evolutionary change:

7. Stability may occur, as in getting stuck in a rut (a local minimum -- or maximum -- in the adaptational landscape). Variants happen, but they're either nonviable or backslide easily.

8. Systematic recombination (crossing over, sex) generates many more variants than do copying errors and the far-rarer point mutations. Or, for that matter, nonsystematic recombination such as bacterial conjugation or the conflation of ideas.

9. Fluctuating environments (seasons, climate changes, diseases) change the name of the game, shaping up more complex patterns capable of doing well in several environments. For such jack-of-all-trades selection to occur, the climate must change much faster than efficiency adaptations can track it (more in a minute).

10. Parcellation (as when rising sea level converts the hilltops of one large island into an archipelago of small islands) typically speeds evolution. It raises the surface-to-volume ratio (or perimeter-to-area ratio) and exposes a higher percentage of the population to the marginal conditions on the margins.

11. Local extinctions (as when an island population becomes too small to sustain itself) speed evolution because they create empty niches. The pioneers that rediscover the niche get a series of generations with no competition, enough resources even for the odder variants that would never grow up to reproduce under any competition. For a novel pattern, that could represent the chance to "establish itself" before the next climate change, for which it might prove better suited than the others.

One thing I like about William Calvin's writing is that he is very straight about all of this, and not afraid to put his thinking out there, simultaneously acknowledging any shortfalls it may have. He is able to, better than anyone else I've ever read so far, put the process into words, make the "verb" of evolution comprehensible, translate it into a "noun" without killing its essence, while still managing to convey that yes, it IS actually a verb.

Another thing I like is that he does not discuss mechanisms of evolution apart from a discussion of how the planet itself, the conditions, geographical, climatic, etc., play a role, e.g., point 10, parcellation. He is working out details on the idea that human intelligence/consciousness was massively driven forward/developed by learning to cope with the ice ages, especially the last couple.

[Diane]

I found this (http://dericbownds.net/2007/03/primate-beginnings-of-morality.html) on Mindblog this morning: " Primate beginnings of morality".

It refers to an article, linked below, from the NYT. Alas, the article replicates an error by referring to chimpanzees instead of to bonobos, a similar but morphologically distinct species. If Franz de Waal is involved, it's safe to bet the article is about bonobos, not common garden variety male-dominated chimp troops.

[Diane]

Here is more about bonobos from the New Yorker, via MindBlog.