A recent issue of Telepolis carried
a chapter from Peter Russell's book,
The Global Brain Awakens. In this excerpt, Russell predicted
the coming of a worldwide intelligence networked by computer web.
It might come as a surprise to the British
computer scientist, experimental biologist, and physicist to discover
that the researchers and theoreticians who specialize in evolution
would sneer at the fundamental assumptions underlying this vision.
The reason for the evolutionary community's contempt? A concept called
individual selection. An idea which has provided powerful new ways
of looking at human behavior since it was first codified roughly 30
years ago. But a concept which since then has partially degenerated
from an intellectual lens to a set of blinders.
This article will expose the shaky roots
of individual selectionism. And it will summarize one model- my own-
which could provide a missing bridge between the skeptics - evolutionary
scientists - and the believers-computer specialists who envision a
planet pulsating with shared information. A planet, as Russell puts
it, which has grown a global nervous system.
The scientific credentials of those
who predict a worldwide intelligence are impeccable. Peter Russell
studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge, worked with
Stephen Hawking, obtained a post-graduate degree (once again at Cambridge)
in experimental psychology, and also has a degree in experimental
psychology. Joel de Rosnay, author of the 1986 book Le Cerveau Planétaire
(The Planetary Brain), has been Director of Research Applications
at the Pasteur Institute, a research associate in biology and computer
graphics at MIT, and was instrumental in the creation of France's
Center for the Study of Systems and Advanced Technologies. Valentin
Turchin, a key member of the international "Global Brain Study
Group," holds three degrees in theoretical physics. Gottfried
Mayer-Kress, author of The Emergence of Global Brains in Cyber Space,
holds a doctorate in theoretical physics from The University of Stuttgart
and has been associated with such prestige institutions as CERN, Los
Alamos National Lab, and the Santa Fe Institute. Francis Heylighen,
another catalytic member of the "Global Brain Study Group,"
possesses a doctorate in physics from the University of Brussels and
is, among other things, associate director of Brussels' multi-disciplinary
Center Leo Apostel.
Why, then, would an international fellowship
of equally august specialists be likely to deride as naive pseudo-science
the notion of superorganismic intelligence?
The individual selectionists who dominate
today's "Neo-Darwinism" believe that all human and animal
behavior is the result of genetic avariciousness. Even the most seemingly
self-sacrificial deed is the result of a hidden calculation of genetic
costs and benefits. A gene sufficiently greedy to guarantee that two
copies of itself make it into the next generation will rapidly expand
its numbers. Genes which program for self-denial will give up resources
to help others. As a consequence, some of these group players will
launch no copies of themselves. The population of unselfish genes
will dwindle generation after generation until the contributors to
the larger good have philanthropized themselves out of existence.
And the long-term survivors will be pre-programmed to commit an act
of cooperation only if the price of what they are forced to relinquish
pays off in a genetic profit.
Meanwhile, another school of evolutionary
thought has been driven underground. It is known as group selectionism.
Those few evolutionary scientists willing to admit to their belief
in group selection aver that individuals will sacrifice their unique
genetic legacy in the interests of a larger whole. Such a need to
cooperate and converge would be necessary to make the global brain
and the planetary nervous system possible. On the other hand, if the
individual selectionists prove correct, humans will be unwilling to
share knowledge which might give others an edge. The cyber-ocean of
the worldwide web and its technological successors will be a barracuda
pit rather than a meta-intellect.
Numerous academics in journals which
shun emotionally biased language have labeled group selectionism "a
heresy." Robert Wright, the chronicler of individual-selectionist
evolutionary psychology, is more gentle in his condemnation. Group
selectionism, he says, is simply a seductive "temptation."
Robert Wright calls individual selectionist
psychology "the new paradigm." But the concept of individual
selection is showing the rigidity of age. The view that all behavior
is ultimately based on self-interest began its climb early in the
20th century. Cloaked as "the survival instinct," it dominated
another questionable orthodoxy-the fight or flight syndrome hinted
at by William McDougall in 1908 and popularized by Walter Cannon in
1929. As research psychologist Robert E. Thayer says, "certain
aspects of the fight or flight response were never supported by scientific
evidence." What's more, the fight or flight model can be only
partially correct. Creatures confronted with an overwhelming threat
are frequently immobilized by anxiety, resignation and a variety of
related physiological mechanisms. In other words, instead of battling
or running to save their lives, they leave themselves open to the
jaws of the predator. So much for the ubiquity of the survival instinct!
Yet fight-or-flight remains gospel to this day. Over thirty years
after Cannon, however, W.D. Hamilton and others had the courage to
face at least one small fly in the self-interest ointment. If individual
survival is the be all and end all of existence, how could one account
for altruism?
During the early '60s, Hamilton focussed
on the selfless manner in which female worker bees sacrifice their
reproductive rights and chastely serve their queen. His triumph was
a mathematical demonstration that the workers were carrying essentially
the same genes as their queen. Hence when an individual lived out
her life on behalf of her monarch, she only appeared to be ignoring
her own needs. By pampering the colony's egg-layer, each worker was
coddling replicas of her own biological heritage. Altruism, asserted
Hamilton, was genetic self-interest in disguise.
Hamilton's ideas and those built upon
them have contributed mightily to our understanding of evolutionary
mechanisms in fields from medicine, ecology, and psychology to ethology-the
study of animals in the wild. But roughly 25 years after the Hamiltonian
epiphany, examination of real world bee colonies demonstrated that
William Hamilton's mathematics did not correspond with fact. There
was far more genetic variety in societies of unselfish insects than
the equations would allow. Individuals were not abjuring their interests
simply to protect near-clones of their own genomic material. Apparently
something else was going on.
Nonetheless, concepts based on what
became known as individual selection hardened into dogma. And many
of those tempted to posit non-Hamiltonian approaches have been stopped
by the quiet threat of exclusion from professional respectability,
of expulsion from career advancement, and of prohibition from the
achievement of academic tenure.
In the mid-90s a growing group of scientists
have risked ridicule by arguing for the simultaneous validity of group
and individual selection. State University of New York evolutionary
biologist David Sloan Wilson, who has produced papers championing
group selection for over 25 years, is this band's acknowledged pioneer.
I have been the organizer of one of its guerrilla brigades - "The
Group Selection Squad." And my theoretical work indicates strongly
that the social and biological sciences may benefit enormously from
a selectionist reappraisal.
David Sloan Wilson has pointed to over
400 studies which support the group selectionist point of view. He
has concentrated his attention on research indicating that among humans,
those who pool their reasoning usually make far better decisions than
those who keep their thoughts to themselves. I've focussed my efforts
elsewhere, introducing to the debate a scientific discipline whose
data individual selectionists refuse to take into consideration. This
obdurately-overlooked field is psychoneuroimmunology - the study of
the interplay between physiology and conditions in the "mental"
or psycho-social environment.
As we've already seen, individual selectionists
insist that a creature-be he man or beast-will only sacrifice his
comfort if the payback to his genes is greater than what he gives
up. His self-abnegatory behavior must benefit close relatives, the
carriers of genes like his own. This is called "kin selection."
A living thing can give up an aspect of its welfare on behalf of a
non-relative...but only if it has reason to expect that this favor
will be returned. This theoretical loophole is known as "reciprocal
altruism."
Yet as long ago as the early 1940s,
researchers like Rene Spitz were already discovering that among humans
the genetic survival instinct had a counterpart of an unexpected nature.
It was a physiological twin of Freud's supposed Thanatos, the death
wish. The new empiricists lacked Freud's genius for coining catchwords.
They merely noted what occurred and came up with separate labels ("anaclitic
shock," "learned helplessness") for each instance they
identified. In my book The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition
into the forces of history, I've taken the liberty of introducing
a blanket designation. Each investigator from Spitz to Harry Harlow
to Lydia Temoshok to Martin Seligman and Robert Sapolsky has unearthed
an example of a "self-destruct mechanism."
Let's take a typical example. Numerous
investigations performed by scientists of widely varying points of
view have revealed that the hospital patients who need help the most-those
submerged in depression-are the least likely to receive aid. At first
glance, it appears to be their own fault. Depressed patients behave
in a manner which makes doctors and nurses avoid them. They become
incommunicative and irritable. They upset others through every means
from facial expression and verbal intonation to body language. An
individual selectionist would explain that such self-damaging behavior
must be the result of an adaptive response-one which relieves close
relatives of a burden or confers upon them a benefit ("kin selection")
or one which stores up the good-will of someone who will compensate
the self-victimizing individual or other carriers of his genes in
the future ("reciprocal altruism").
However empirical studies show the opposite.
The patients with the greatest number of relatives and friends are
the least likely to be depressed. Instead they tend to be the cheerful
souls who, even in the face of death, remain charming and bring doctors
and nurses flocking sympathetically to their bedside. So those who
according to the individual selectionists could benefit replicas of
their genes through their demise are the least likely to be stricken
prematurely by the axe of death.
On the other hand, both animal and human
studies demonstrate that depressed beings flirting with the grim reaper
are those the individual selectionists would least expect-those least
likely to benefit genes similar to their own. Their family ties are
either malformed or non-existent. The immune systems of creatures
with few or no friends and intimate kin shut down, while the immunological
resistance of those who are part of a social web remain far more vigorous.
In other words, isolated individuals undergo a strictly involuntary
surrender to disease and bodily dissolution. They are seized by something
akin to the suicide mechanism called apoptosis, a sequence of self-destruct
events pre-programmed into nearly every living cell and activated
when the cell receives signals that it is no longer of use to the
larger community of which it is a part. Between their self-crippling
immune-systems and their self-defeating conduct, isolated individuals
vastly increase their odds of death. The payoff to copies of their
genes is likely to be zero. None of this squares with the elaborate
dogma of individual selectionism.
When caught in a bind, individual selectionists
frequently claim that we are witnessing an instinct which was helpful
during our days in hunter-gatherer tribes-an instinct which, under
Pleistocene conditions, genuinely did enhance the survival chances
of those with similar genes. However, these apologists proclaim, what
benefitted the genes at our core in the days of the first stone axe
has been perverted in its purpose by modern industrial civilization.
This argument is unlikely to hold water.
The isolation of chimps, dogs, laboratory mice, and a wide variety
of other animals leads to depression, a down-shifting of the immune
system, and a failure to either see or use avenues of escape. Like
us, creatures without industrialism dramatically increase their odds
of death when they are severed from their social bonds, not when their
disappearance stands to benefit the carriers of genes like their own.
This is where the new model of the evolutionary
process I've introduced in The Lucifer Principle and will elaborate
further in an upcoming volume called The Irrational Invention Machine
may come in handy. Let us suppose for a moment that group selectionists
are correct. Individuals will sacrifice themselves for the good of
a larger whole. Those larger wholes compete. When groups struggle,
the ones which boast the most effective organizational, strategic
and technical advantages win. Individuals who contribute to their
group's virtuosity will be part of the team which survives. And in
this manner does evolution proceed.
Now let's add to the group selectionist
claims another concept-one familiar to the mathematicians of complexity.
Complex adaptive systems are learning machines made up of numerous
components. Neural nets and immune systems are particularly good examples.
Both apply an algorithm best expressed non-mathematically by Jesus
of Nazareth: "To him who hath it shall be given; from he who
hath not even what he hath shall be taken away."
The neural net has an extensive population
of individual switch points-electronic nodes whose connection to the
larger grid can be increased or radically diminished. An immune system
takes the principle a step further. It has between ten million and
ten billion different antibody types alone. In addition it possesses
a flood of entities known as "individual virus-specific T cells."
Both the immune system and the neural net follow the Biblical precept.
Elements which contribute successfully to the solution of a communal
problem receive resources and influence. But deprivation is the lot
of those elements unable to assist the group. In the immune system,
T cells encounter the MHC insignia of an invader. A small proportion
of the would-be defenders discover that their unique receptors allow
them to help defeat the attackers. These champions are allowed to
reproduce with explosive speed, and are given the raw material they
need to increase their numbers. T-cells of no use in confronting the
current assault are robbed of food, of the ability to procreate, and
often of life itself. Each is subject to destruction from within via
the "pre-programmed cell death" of apoptosis.
In the neural net, nodes whose collaboration
contributes to the solution of a problem are rewarded with more electrical
energy and with connections to a far flung skein of recruits. The
nodes whose efforts prove irrelevant to the problem at hand are fed
less electrical juice, and their ability to connect with and arouse
others is dramatically decreased. Both T cells and network nodes compete
for the right to commandeer the resources of the larger system. And
both show a seeming "willingness" to abide by the rules
which dictate denial. This combination of competition and selflessness
turns an agglomeration of electronic or biological components into
a learning machine whose totality possesses an adaptive power vastly
beyond that of any single element within it.
The same modus operandi is built into
the biological fabric of most social beings. Look, for example, at
evidence from the phenomenon which its discoverers call "learned
helplessness." Animals and humans able to solve a repeated problem
remain vigorous. But mice, monkeys, dogs and people who cannot get
a handle on recurrent misfortune become victims of the self-destruct
mechanisms mentioned above. Let's be more specific. Experiments on
the physiological impact of mastering a problem began in the 1950s,
when Joseph Brady and his colleagues devised a cruel but clever mechanism.
They placed two small chairs side by side. The chairs were wired into
an electrical circuit which would deliver simultaneous shocks of identical
voltage to each of the contraptions' loungers. The experimental subjects
destined to be strapped into these hot seats would be monkeys. Only
one thing made the monkey on the left different from that on the right.
The right-hand monkey was given a button with which he could solve
the pair's joint dilemma. With it, he could turn each shock off when
it arrived. Investigators assumed that the primate with the switch
would develop severe health problems. He was the "executive monkey,"
the one of the pair weighed down with responsibility. The beast sitting
next to him was relieved of his pain at the same instant. But this
free-rider had to exercise no judgement or effort. Surely the creature
without the switch would thrive more readily, unencumbered by the
double burden of distress and vigilance. Indeed, early analyses seemed
to demonstrate that this assumption had been correct. The monkeys
with the ordeal of decision making were declared to have a far greater
tendency to develop ulcers.
But later inquiry showed that the executive
monkey experiments had fatal design flaws. Their results had been
invalid. Twenty years down the road, variations on the experiment
demonstrated something rather different. When put into adjacent shock
cages, one of which had a control switch and one of which didn't,
two lab rats would at first scurry and jump attempting to find a means
of escape from the arbitrary administration of Thor's lightning. The
rat in one cage would soon find his control button. When the current
sizzled his soles, he would lunge for the switch and turn it off,
rescuing both himself and his comrade. The rat whose frantic search
resulted in no discovery of a means of control, on the other hand,
would eventually give up his struggle, lie down in the cage, and accept
his jolts with an air of resignation.
As "learned helplessness"
experiments continued, it was discovered that more than mere laziness
was crippling the beast unable to contribute to the resolution of
the shared dilemma. His immune system no longer protected him from
disease. If given a way to escape his situation, his perception was
too bleary to see it or to register its utility. His self-destruct
mechanisms had taken control. All indications were that these self-maiming
reflexes were physiologically pre-programmed. Most telling was the
fact that the beast able to cope with the slings and arrows of a researcher's
outrageous fortunes retained a vigorous immune system, a relatively
keen perception of the world around him, and remained active and energetic-despite
his periodic spurts of torment. How might his neighbor's internally-inflicted
disablement aid the projection of the victim's genes into the next
generation? Apparently no one bothered to ask.
A naturalist named V.C. Wynne Edwards,
however, had already observed the effects of these phenomenon in a
social context. Under feral conditions innumerable species are not
isolated by a cage but live as part of a larger group. Edwards studied
wild grouse in the Scottish moors. Here, punishments and rewards were
handed out not by scientists, but by the natural and the social environment.
Male grouse whose mastery of their surroundings enabled them to find
good provisions of food and safe sleeping conditions became strong
and self-confident. Those less able to forage successfully or to find
the safest roost became less physically robust. Weakened, they entered
the seasonal competition for females. They fought their problem-mastering
flockmates in one-on-one battles, and usually lost. Their failure
to find a way to dominate their natural environment led to a corresponding
failure to gain control in their social environment.
The successful birds ended up with avian
harems, access to even more food than before, and an increased level
of pep and acumen. The losers had insult heaped to their injury. As
their self-destruct mechanisms kicked in, they showed symptoms which
comparative psychologists have called a direct analog of human depression.
Like the rats with no handle on their fate, these unfortunates gave
up, resigning themselves to a position on the outskirts of the flock-the
very location in which they would be most tempting to a passing fox.
They lost appetite. As their immune systems shifted into low gear,
they grew unhealthy. And in times of scarcity, they were the first
to die.
Wynne-Edwards theorized that he was
watching group selection at work. The birds whose failure had led
to a physical decline, he felt, were sacrificing themselves to adjust
the group size to the carrying capacity-the amount of food and other
necessities-in their locale. The Scot announced his conclusions in
1962. By 1964 William Hamilton's equations had taken the evolutionary
community by storm. Wynne Edwards became the poster boy for group
selection and was driven from scientific respectability. He is cited
in current textbooks primarily as an exemplar of scientific error.
What Wynne-Edwards had seen at work
was a complex adaptive system devilishly similar to a neural net.
Those individuals within the group capable of finding solutions to
the problems of the moment were rewarded with dominance, desirable
food and lodging, and sexual privileges. The weak links in the group's
neural net, the individuals who had not found a means of solving the
environmental puzzles thrown their way, were isolated and impoverished
by the social system and disabled by self destruction.
In other words, the group had shown
all the key characteristics of a functional learning machine, a complex
adaptive system, or, if you prefer, a superorganism. Later, Israeli
naturalist Amotz Zahavi would demonstrate that groups of birds function
as communal information processing apparatuses. However Zahavi failed
to put his observations together with those of Wynne Edwards, with
those of the "learned helplessness" experimenters, and with
the principles of complex adaptive systems.
My work since 1981 has been to demonstrate
that these elements are parts of a single puzzle. The existence of
self-destruct mechanisms, the fact that they are turned on and off
by control of circumstance, and the fact that social animals are linked
in information-exchange networks explains the mechanism behind David
Sloan Wilson's research-survey conclusion that a group usually solves
problems better than the individuals within it.
In short, if one acknowledges that individuals
like the grouse do indeed compete for reproductive advantage (remember
the seasonal tournaments which determined which avian males would
receive mates), but that their competition takes place within the
framework of a connective intelligence, the idea of group selection
seems a necessity. Pit one massively parallel information processor
against another-a constant occurrence in nature-and that which most
successfully takes advantage of complex adaptive system rules, that
which is the most powerful cooperative learning machine, will almost
always win.
It is time for evolutionists to open
their minds and abandon individual selectionism as a rigid creed which
cannot co-exist with its supposed opposite, group selection. For if
I am right, the networked intelligence foreseen by computer scientists
and physicists as a product of emerging technologies has been around
a very long time. In fact, it has sculpted the perverse physiological
makeup which manifests itself in our depressive lethargy, our paralyzing
anxiety, the irritability which drives others away when we need them
most, our resignation when attainment repeatedly eludes us, and the
failure of our health when we become victims of overwhelming loss
or crisis. These physiologically pre-wired features have made us microprocessors
in the most intriguing form of parallel computer ever constructed
on this earth. Without transistors, they have turned each one of us
into cells of a networked brain.
Three questions and Howard Bloom's
responses
Are scientists like Gerald Edelman
with his neuronal darwinism concept also suggesting group selection
within populations of neurons?
Howard Bloom: Yes
and no. First, you are wise to connect Edelman's work with complex
adaptive systems principles. You probably know that 50% of the brain
cells are killed off through apoptosis in the first year of life.
Those which don't match the challenges in the baby's environment are
the ones to go. It is the principle of "to him who hath it shall
be given, from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away"
at work.
However individual selectionists would scoff at the idea that this
represents group selection - though discrete populations of neurons
compete and live or die by the results of their success. Individual
selectionists would say that since all the neuronal cells involved
in this battle carry the same genetic content, the principle at work
is the same as that in Hamilton's original (and inaccurate) model
of an insect colony. That is, each instance of self-sacrifice represents
kin selection in which a suicidal cell commits an altruistic act to
benefit copies of its genes within other cells of the macro-organism.
If this sounds a bit like the hair-splitting
of the medieval scholastics, it is. However too often scientists become
so obsessed with squabbling over the knothole in one pine tree that
they utterly fail to register the existence of the forest of which
that tree is a part. In fact, they may even claim that the tree itself
does not exist.
Do you think that group selection
is also behind recent social developments and now again visible with
the destruction of the social welfare state coming along with the
globalization?
Howard Bloom: Yes,
very much so. The proliferation of and competition between subcultures
is one form of group selection which powers the machinations of the
collective brain. I will demonstrate how in my next book, The Irrational
Invention Machine. In addition, social critics like America's John
Naisbett (Megatrends) and several major historians have claimed convincingly
that one social current leads to the birth of its opposite. Hegel
would have approved. Today's globalization is spawning an opposite
but equal reaction - tribalization, the fragmentation of society into
increasingly self-contained mini-groups. However it is through this
manner of differentiation and competition that a complex adaptive
system proceeds to invent new modalities for altering its environment.
In other words, your supposition, in my view, is accurate. What economists
call constructive destruction is integral to the operation of the
group brain.
Group selection and a self destroying
mechanism in individuals seem to be a very cruel procedure in an ethical
context and it reminds at the concept of social darwinism. What status
could an ethical approach have in this point of view and which kind
of ethics could fit within the context of group selection?
Howard Bloom: Nature,
in the words of The Lucifer Principle, is not the benevolent mother
that her proponents think. In fact, she is a parent who exults in
child abuse. Her viciousness is built into our biology at so many
levels that it has become integral not only to our physiology but
to each and every human culture. All societies, including the pre-colonial
Inuit so often lauded for their peaceful ways, designate groups of
people it is permissible to hate. Hatred of outsiders, in fact, has
been proven by innumerable scientific studies to be one of the strongest
bonds holding a cultural or subcultural group together. Though it
has been imposed on us involuntarily, this modus operandi is morally
despicable. As a consequence, it is incumbent on you, me, and everyone
else with a moral sensibility to do the following: Rebel against nature
and her ways. Stop violence wherever you can. If you pass a mugging
in the street, end it (I always do...and I am both puny and unathletic).
If you see mass murder and fail to try to bring it to a halt, you
are an accomplice in its execution. And so am I.
Most importantly, watch out for the
dark side of your own idealism and of your moral sense. Both come
from our arsenal of natural instincts. And both easily degenerate
into an excuse for attacks on others. When our righteous indignation
breathes the flames of anger against a "villain," we all
too often become a fang in nature's scheme of tooth and claw. No martians
or heavenly saviors will arrive to save us from our inborn evil. We
must battle the nature outside of us and within us in order to save
our selves.
