Posted on 06/02/2003 1:46:54 PM PDT by Heartlander
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Blinded by Science |
| Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, by Matt Ridley HarperCollins, 336 pp., $25.95) This is a very strange book, and I am not quite sure what the author is attempting to achieve. At the very least it appears that he wants to shore up genetic determinism as the key factor in understanding human nature and individual behavior. Genetic determinism is rational materialism's substitute for the religious notion of predestination; taking the place of God as puppet master are the genes, whose actions and interactions control who we are, what we think, and how we act. This reductionist view received a body blow recently when the mappers of the human genome found that we have only about 30,000 genes. Because of their understanding of human complexity, the scientists were expecting at least 100,000 -- and that means there are probably too few genes for strict genetic determinism to be true. Ridley, a science writer and former U.S. editor of The Economist, tries to ride to the rescue. In doing so, he adds a twist that he hopes will overcome our apparent genetic paucity: Yes, he says, our genes decide who we are, what we do and think, and even with whom we fall in love. But, he posits, our molecular masters are not rigidly preset when we are born. Rather, they change continually in reaction to our biological and emotional experiences. Hence, 30,000 are more than enough for a soft genetic determinism to be true -- which means that the battle between those who believe we are the product of our biology (nature) versus those who believe we are the result of our environment (nurture) can now end in a truce in which both sides win. We are indeed controlled by our genes, but they in turn are influenced by our experiences. Ridley says that the mapping of the genome "has indeed changed everything, not by closing the argument or winning the [nature versus nurture] battle for one side or the other, but by enriching it from both ends till they meet in the middle." To Ridley, the core of our true selves isn't soul, mind, or even body in the macro sense; we are, in essence, merely the expression of our genes at any given moment. If this is true, then my perception of Nature via Nurture as so much nonsense was the only reaction I could have had, given my original genetic programming, as later modified by my every experience and emotion from my conception, through the womb, childhood, high school, college, practicing law, the death of my father, indeed up to and including the reading of this book. If that is so – if I was forced by my gene expression of the moment to perceive this book as I have -- what have we really learned that can be of any benefit to humankind? We are all slaves to chemistry and there is no escape. Even aside from such broader issues, Ridley does not make a persuasive case. Maybe it is my legal training, but I found his evidence very thin. He doesn't present proofs so much as resort to wild leaps of logic predicated on questionably relevant social science and facile analogies based on a few animal studies. These are simply not strong enough to be the sturdy weight-supporting pillars that his thesis requires to be credible. Let's look at just one example. He cites studies of monogamous prairie voles to suggest that humans only think they fall in love, when, in reality, what we call love is merely the expression of genes resulting in the release of the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Claiming that he is not going to "start extrapolating anthropomorphically from pair-bonding in voles to love in people," he proceeds to do just that. Citing the vole studies and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- in which a love potion makes Titania fall in love with a man with a donkey's head – Ridley writes: Who would now wager against me that I could not do something like this to a modern Titania? Admittedly, a drop on the eyelids would not suffice. I would have to give her a general anesthetic while I cannulated her medial amygdala and injected oxytocin into it. I doubt even then that I could make her love a donkey. But I might stand a fair chance of making her feel attracted to the first man she sees upon waking. Would you bet against me? But shouldn't it take far more than measuring the physical effects of oxytocin on prairie voles to prove that something as complex, maddening, unpredictable, and wonderfully and uniquely human as romantic love can, in reality, be reduced to the mere expression of genes leading to chemical secretions? Not, apparently, to Ridley. "Blindly, automatically, and untaught, we bond with whoever is standing nearest when oxytocin receptors in the medial amygdala get tingled." Gee, if he'd known that, Bill Clinton could have purchased fewer copies of Leaves of Grass. The most fascinating thing about this book is that Ridley inadvertently makes a splendid argument for intelligent design. At this point, I am sure Ridley's "I am utterly appalled" genes are expressing wildly. He is, after all, a scientific materialist in good standing. Yet, throughout the book, in order to make his arguments understandable, he resorts explicitly to the imagery of the guiding hand. He even gives it a name: the "Genome Organizing Device," or "G.O.D." Ridley claims that the G.O.D is "a skillful chef, whose job is to build a souffle," consisting of the various parts of us and all other life on the planet. Note the language of intentionality in his description of the evolution of the human brain: To build a brain with instinctive abilities, the Genome Organizing Device lays down separate circuits with suitable internal patterns that allow them to carry out suitable computations, then links them with appropriate inputs from the senses. . . . In the case of the human mind, almost all such instinctive modules are designed to be modified by experience. Some adapt continuously throughout life, some change rapidly with experience then set like cement. A few just develop to their own timetable. But according to my lay understanding, this violates the theory and philosophy of evolution. The hypothesis of natural selection holds that species origination and change are promoted by genetic mutations. Those mutations that change the organism to make it more likely than its unchanged peers to survive long enough to reproduce are likely to be passed down the generations. Eventually, these genetic alterations spread among the entire species and become universal within its genome. It is through this dynamic evolutionary process of modification, the theory holds, that life fills all available niches in nature. It is also the process, although the details are not known, by which the primates now known as homo sapiens became conscious. The philosophy of Darwinism posits that this evolutionary process is aimless, unintentional, purposeless, and without rhyme or reason. This means it has no biological goal: It just is. Hence, G.O.D. would not want to "build a brain," develop nature via nurture in species, or do any other thing. Yet, throughout the book, Ridley seems able only to describe what he thinks is going on using the language of intention. Could this be because Ridley's theories would require interactions that are so complex and unlikely that they would seem laughable if described as having come together haphazardly, by mere chance? So what are we to learn from his insights? In terms of how we live our lives, not much beyond what common sense already tells us: Parents matter and should engage with their children; human teenagers enjoy doing what they are good at, and dislike doing what they are bad at; and so on. That much is harmless; but Ridley's deeper point is subversive of human freedom and individual accountability. He denies the existence of free will: Our actions are not causes but effects, "prespecified by, and run by, genes." Indeed, he claims unequivocally, "There is no 'me' inside my brain, there is only an ever-changing set of brain states, a distillation of history, emotion, instinct, experience, and the influence of other people -- not to mention chance." Ridley asserts this as if it would be a good thing to learn that the complexity and richness of human experience could accurately be reduced to merely the acts of so many slaves obeying the lash of chemical overseers acting under the direction of our experience-influenced gene owners. "Nature versus nurture is dead," Ridley concludes triumphantly. "Long live nature via nurture." Sorry. Maybe it's my genes, but I just don't buy it. |
I don't know that too many people look at the problem like this. For one intelligence to create another equal intelligence, one only has to do two things. First, one has to discover/invent a clever finite control function (which any reasonably good intelligence could theoretically do), that efficiently converts the Kolmogorov complexity of a state machine into intelligence. Second, one must be able to build such a state machine that is sufficiently large that it will exhibit the same effective KC as the intelligence that created it when applying the control function.
That control function is the part that requires real cleverness, but it is a small finite thing that does not vary with the amount of intelligence expressed with it. Increasing the KC of a state machine amounts to increasing the working memory of it, and things like Moore's law work inexorably towards that end. Therefore, once you've solved the problem of a tractable finite control function, you've solved the problem of intelligence of all types. For most of the history of computer science, the control functions that have been known in this space were so egregiously poor that they have only been tractable for nothing but toy problems no matter how much hardware we threw at them. This has been changing as a new class of control functions have been discovered in the last couple years that seem to be very reasonably tractable to high complexity. When these new algorithms make it into the commercial space, I think it will fundamentally change the view of the types of things computers can do because they break certain assumed limitations of computers.
As numerous studies have shown, people's "intuition" has a terrible track record, ranging from being statistically no better than a "wild-assed guess" to WORSE than statistical chance. When people use facts and reasoning, they get the answer right more often than not even in the absence of complete information. When they use intuition, a betting man will say they are wrong, a fact supported by actual statistical studies of "intuition". Intuition is highly over-rated and what liberals rely on absent their ability to reason.
One can assert intuition as a reason, but someone else could just as easily show that this fact alone indicates that they are wrong more likely than not. At best it makes for a highly unqualified argument. Like everyone else I have intuitive impulses as well, but I know better than to use them as a "reason" for anything.
Shucks, tp, you found me out. Yes, I am God. I've just been participating in FR in order to learn, especially from your feedback. But you were too wise for me. You've put me in my place.
</sarcasm drippings> ;-`
Whether one has accurate data or not, when people use facts and reasoning without intuition... well that just doesn't happen. ;-) Also, "here 'you' go again..." making the same error that we've been talking about over and over and over again. Your statement presumes we may attain to some deific epistemological state where we may gain some set called "complete information."
Seems to me that in your post you are positing as if one uses intuition only (and wrongly) in the realm that is rightly that of reason. Of course one doesn't use intuition to calculate. (Though you do use it in order to let you know something about what your calculations are good for and not.) Here again, it's a matter of definition and semantics.
I'm not speaking of intuition as if it were making up the answer (like picking a horse to bet on out of the blue). I'm referring to intuition in its place, without which we have no basis at all for reason. I am speaking of getting to know reality... getting to know what truths are, by their natures and the imagery of the inner man (may be an objectionable term, how about 'less sensorily specified') first, what reason may properly be applied to, and how, and why.
You won't find many scientists devising experiments (thought experiments or physical ones) without intuition.
You can tell me facts and calculations without applying much intuition, but try telling me about the nature and behavior of functions in a system without applying your intuition.
Why do you have intuition, as well as reason? What is a productive interplay? If reason has a specialty which may be called logic, does intuition have a specialty? What is that? (Presuming that you believe in evolution theory and that each of the aspects of your behavior are fit for survival/reproduction.)
The point at 947 was particularly interesting since I had just minutes before read this article by Karl Popper: Sir Karl Popper "Science as Falsification," 1963.
I agree with you that intuition is a very good thing for the troubleshooter, the soldier, the parent, the artist and a vast number of scenarios. In many instances the intuition is “informed” by training, qualia and past experience.
But intuition in science can be problematic, because charismatic theories are not true by popular intuitive vote. That’s where the Popper article comes in. You might be interested in this excerpt:
The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which "verified" the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasize by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation — which revealed the class bias of the paper — and especially of course what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their "clinical observations." …
These considerations led me in the winter of 1919-20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.")
One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
The point at 947 was particularly interesting since I had just minutes before read this article by Karl Popper: Sir Karl Popper "Science as Falsification," 1963.
I agree with you that intuition is a very good thing for the troubleshooter, the soldier, the parent, the artist and a vast number of scenarios. In many instances the intuition is “informed” by training, qualia and past experience.
Well.... Thank you very much for your relating this, about falsification. Of course, intuition is necessary, in order to even come up with attempts to falsify, right. It is difficult I'd say, to come up with many experiments that aren't developed by a scientist's imagining of at least elements of it, in order to devise it.
To me, while Popper's discontent with confirmation is very valid, I think that at heart this is a matter of man's overconfidence and overextentions of his pet theories (especially in the theorist's heart). -- I suppose then, a a struggle with evidences is what it is at head. ;-) Pinging bb here, since I think she also has a pet theory of the overextension of theories by theorists!
And as it happens, djf was just telling me about Kurt Godel and A. S. Eddington.
What would Godel have to say about Popper's confidence that anything that can be falsified is untrue? (But then, not even mathematics provides "proof" in quite the way that objective physical evidence is scientific proof.)
(This particular tangent of mine came from my disagreement with way of dismissing Heartlander's little parable of the thinking machine and the programmer out of hand, based upon a kind of anecdotal use of scientific evidence. Heartlander was dealing with matters beyond physical sciences, in a very logical little fable about consciousness not being subsumptive of consciouslessness.)
This particular tangent of mine came from my disagreement with tortoise's way of dismissing Heartlander's little parable of the thinking machine and the programmer out of hand, based upon a kind of anecdotal use of scientific evidence. Heartlander was dealing with matters beyond physical sciences, in a very logical little fable about consciousness not being subsumptive of consciouslessness.
And in naming, I should ping.
But in case tp is reading this, "Enough about me...."
My point in bringing up Popper was to illustrate the tendency of some to "annoint" a scientific theory as true, without putting it to a rigorous test.
IOW, intuition would not be helpful in determining the truth of Einstein's theories and would be misleading with Marx.
I think you are really referring to learned heuristics, rules and patterns that we've learned and can apply them without conscious intent. The difference being that if you really think about why you intuited something, you can come up with a reasonable explanation. Intuition typically fails because the learned scope is much narrower than the attempted application.
The problem (and I've had this discussion about the definition of "intuition" before) is that there isn't a really clear definition of what that means. Some would say that it only applies to subconscious rational heuristics, while many people actually do define it to include a lot of irrational emotionally driven (lack of) reasoning. It is hard to know if I agree or disagree with a person on the issue of "intuition" because that term has particularly fuzzy definition in general usage.
I'm pondering on this and cannot visualize any form of intuition that would not have a basis in past experience, sense, thought symbol/language or preference. I don't know how they could be excluded, especially in the subconscious.
My dismissal was neither arbitrary nor capricious. Heartlanders construction, and even the very argument of subsumption, is essentially a false dichotomy or at the very least a strawman. I was (sort of) yanking things back on track.
Now, if you are asserting that this discussion has transcended into the metaphysical and thereby dismissing any requirements for grounding in rigor or mathematics, then I'm fine with that and I'll just shut up. But as far as I knew we weren't going there. Somewhere a couple towns back the discussion jumped its tracks or at least took a strange turn. Certainly some of the assumptions of the current discussion (re: subsumption) are very strange and don't seem particularly reasonable to me. It's all good though, and it isn't like this is my thread or anything.
That's my general take, but I've gotten into heated discussions about this very issue. Even among mathematicians there seems to be a desire to elevate intuition to the status of "sacred" or "mystical" despite what (to me) seems to be a complete lack of justification. People have a strong emotional attachment to their "intuition", probably because they'd have to explain themselves more often if they couldn't use that as an excuse. :-)
I generally avoid that argument as fruitless; it is usually a religious argument even for people that aren't religious. I don't go about tipping sacred cows without a good reason.
I'm not seeing a religious issue here. Where there is a spiritual revelation, it is sensed spiritually or mentally.
The same would be true for precognition, retrocognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, near death experiences. And from the other end - prayer, worship, spiritual discernment - come from the inner man as language, symbol or emotion.
I imagine we'd have to get "inside" the fetal mind to formulate a test to determine the point just before these emotions and thoughts arise, i.e. the clean slate, is there any intuition there? That may be beyond our technical capabilities.
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