Stephen Wolfram on Natural Selection

The basic notion that organisms tend to evolve to achieve a maximum fitness has certainly in the past been very useful in providing a general framework for understanding the historical progression of species, and in yielding specific explanations for various fairly simple properties of particular species.

But in present-day thinking about biology the notion has tended to be taken to an extreme, so that especially among those not in daily contact with detailed data on biological systems it has come to be assumed that essentially every feature of every organism can be explained on the basis of it somehow maximizing the fitness of the organism.

It is certainly recognized that some aspects of current organisms are in effect holdovers from earlier stages in biological evolution. And there is also increasing awareness that the actual process of growth and development within an individual organism can make it easier or more difficult for particular kinds of structures to occur.

But beyond this there is a surprisingly universal conviction that any significant property that one sees in any organism must be there because it in essence serves a purpose in maximizing the fitness of the organism.

Often it is at first quite unclear what this purpose might be, but at least in fairly simple cases, some kind of hypothesis can usually be constructed. And having settled on a supposed purpose it often seems quite marvelous how ingenious biology has been in finding a solution that achieves that purpose….

But it is my strong suspicion that such purposes in fact have very little to do with the real reasons that these particular features exist. For instead…what I believe is that these features actually arise in essence just because they are easy to produce with fairly simple programs. And indeed as one looks at more and more complex features of biological organisms ¯ notably texture and pigmentation patterns ¯ it becomes increasingly difficult to find any credible purpose at all that would be served by the details of what one sees.

In the past, the idea of optimization for some sophisticated purpose seemed to be the only conceivable explanation for the level of complexity that is seen in many biological systems. But with the discovery…that it takes only a simple program to produce behavior of great complexity [for example, Wolfram’s Rule 110 cellular automaton ¯ a very simple program with two-color, nearest neighbor rules], a quite different ¯ and ultimately much more predictive ¯ kind of explanation immediately becomes possible.

In the course of biological evolution random mutations will in effect cause a whole sequence of programs to be tried…. Some programs will presumably lead to organisms that are more successful than others, and natural selection will cause these programs eventually to dominate. But in most cases I strongly suspect that it is comparatively coarse features that tend to determine the success of an organism ¯ not all the details of any complex behavior that may occur….

On the basis of traditional biological thinking one would tend to assume that whatever complexity one saw must in the end be carefully crafted to satisfy some elaborate set of constraints. But what I believe instead is that the vast majority of the complexity we see in biological systems actually has its origin in the purely abstract fact that among randomly chosen programs many give rise to complex behavior….

One circumstantial piece of evidence is that one already sees considerable complexity even in very early fossil organisms. Over the course of the past billion or so years, more and more organs and other devices have appeared. But the most obvious outward signs of complexity, manifest for example in textures and other morphological features, seem to have already been present even from very early times.

And indeed there is every indication that the level of complexity of individual parts of organisms has not changed much in at least several hundred million years. So this suggests that somehow the complexity we see must arise from some straightforward and general mechanism ¯ and not, for example, from a mechanism that relies on elaborate refinement through a long process of biological evolution….

…[W]hile natural selection is often touted as a force of almost arbitrary power, I have increasingly come to believe that in fact its power is remarkably limited. And indeed, what I suspect is that in the end natural selection can only operate in a meaningful way on systems or parts of systems whose behavior is in some sense quite simple.

If a particular part of an organism always grows, say, in a simple straight line, then it is fairly easy to imagine that natural selection could succeed in picking out the optimal length for any given environment. But what if an organism can grow in a more complex way…? My strong suspicion is that in such a case natural selection will normally be able to achieve very little.

First, with more complex behavior, there are typically a huge number of possible variations, and in a realistic population of organisms it becomes infeasible for any significant fraction of these variations to be explored.

Second, complex behavior inevitably involves many elaborate details, and since different ones of these details may happen to be the deciding factors in the fates of individual organisms, it becomes very difficult for natural selection to act in a consistent and definitive way.

Third, whenever the overall behavior of a system is more complex than its underlying program, almost any mutation in the program will lead to a whole collection of detailed changes in the behavior, so that natural selection has no opportunity to pick out changes which are beneficial from those which are not.

Fourth, if random mutations can only, say, increase or decrease a length, then even if one mutation goes in the wrong direction, it is easy for another mutation to recover by going in the opposite direction. But if there are in effect many possible directions, it becomes much more difficult to recover from missteps, and to exhibit any form of systematic convergence.

And finally…for anything beyond the very simplest forms of behavior, iterative random searches rapidly tend to get stuck, and make at best excruciatingly slow progress towards any kind of global optimum….

It has often been claimed that natural selection is what makes systems in biology able to exhibit so much more complexity than systems that we explicitly construct in engineering. But my strong suspicion is that in fact the main effect of natural selection is almost exactly the opposite: it tends to make biological systems avoid complexity, and to be more like systems in engineering.

When one does engineering, one normally operates under the constraint that the systems one builds must behave in a way that is readily predictable and understandable. And in order to achieve this one typically limits oneself to constructing systems out of fairly small numbers of components whose behavior and interactions are somehow simple.

But systems in nature need not in general operate under the constraint that their behavior should be predictable and understandable. And what this means is that in a sense they can use any number of components of any kind ¯ with the result…that the behavior they produce can often be highly complex.

However, if natural selection is to be successful at systematically molding the properties of a system then once again there are limitations on the kinds of components that the system can have. And indeed, it seems that what is needed are components that behave in simple and somewhat independent ways ¯ much as in traditional engineering.

At some level it is not surprising that there should be an analogy between engineering and natural selection. For both cases can be viewed as trying to create systems that will achieve or optimize some goal….

…[I]n the end, therefore, what I conclude is that many of the most obvious features of complexity in biological organisms arise in a sense not because of natural selection, but rather in spite of it.

It seems that circular reasoning is an all-too-frequent consequence in theoretical and mathematical physics - when they go out of their way to stay within the natural realm. ... I believe an algorithm lies therein – something of elegance and simplicity, something that points to intelligence or conscientiousness at the root - but they will never find it by manufacturing theory to justify a naturalistic view.

Alamo-Girl, I definitely think you're right about this. Time for a meditation/speculation on theme:

What attracts me to Wolfram is the seriousness and profundity of his purpose. I get the sense he’s searching for one ultimate principle that can accommodate and reconcile physics and metaphysics; cosmology and ontology. As often as he seems to try to avoid the issue entirely, there seems to be in play what may be called a “religious attitude.”

He tells us he believes that “every feature of our universe does indeed come from an ultimate discrete model.” He writes:

“Some may view an ultimate model of the universe as ‘leaving no room for a god’, while others may view it as a direct reflection of the existence of a god.”

The first might be called the “formalist” approach; but the latter is distinctly platonic (not to mention Christian) in its resonance. Wolfram is aware of Plato: Plato gets eight cites in the index, but seems to appear in the main text far more often than that.

I digress. Wolfram continues:

“In any case, knowing a complete and ultimate model does make it impossible to have miracles or divine interventions that come outside the laws of the universe – though working out what will happen on the basis of these laws may nevertheless be irreducibly difficult.”

[I have a dispute with this conclusion; please see below.]

Wolfram’s remarks suggest pantheist belief, as seemingly confirmed in this passage: “Some of my conclusions … may seem to resonate with ideas of Eastern thinking. For example, what I say about the fundamental similarity of human thinking to other processes in nature may seem to fit with Buddhism. And what I say about the irreducibility of processes in nature to short formal rules may seem to fit with Taoism. Like essentially all forms of science, however, what I do in [my] book is done in a rational tradition – with limited relation to the more mystical traditions of Eastern thinking.” [Notice he omits Western cosmological traditions altogether in his analysis of relevant problems.)

Notwithstanding this qualification, Wolfram’s statements about the human condition – e.g., man is nothing intrinsically “special” in himself, but just another quite ordinary component of “nature” – have roots in a concept of the universe that insists god and the universe are one. That is, in Eastern pantheism.

Though Wolfram says such theological speculations are not material to the new kind of science he’s doing, one could argue that such constitute his fundamental “world view,” and thus supply the overriding context in which he conducts his exploration. But he has himself covered there, for he writes:

“[C]ontext can in fact be crucial to the choice of subject matter and interpretation of results in science. But the Principle of Computational Equivalence suggests at some level a remarkable uniformity among systems, that allows all sorts of general scientific statements to be made without dependence on context. It so happens that some of these statements then imply intrinsic general limitations on science – but even the very fact that such statements can be made is in a sense an example of successful generality in science….”

Everything is general. Nothing is special…. Dr. Wolfram may be falling victim to the same disease that has befallen other of his peers, colleagues, and intellectual forebears -- quite a few of whom he critiques in his book.

This disease has a name: systematic reductionism.

* * * * * *

To say that Wolfram’s cellular automata – and/or the general line of his investigation -- are fictions, however, is quite another story. I really do think and believe that he’s onto something new here, something of potentially incalculable value, the method of which he explicates with the greatest of care in the pages of A New Kind of Science.

For he is trying to get us to “retrain our intuition.” And he’s given us a tool to use to do that, if we want to use it. In the end, I suspect that the boost he’s trying to give to human intuition is the ability to refine the visual imagination, explicitly pattern recognition.

So I’m grateful to him, even if he wants to be a Buddhist about it. :^)

* * * * * *

Yet I marvel at the huge detours from Western civilizational culture and experience that this world-class scientist of our age seems to feel he needs to take, perhaps in order to be taken seriously by his colleagues and peers.

Wolfram isn’t an atheist. That must make him feel a tad uncomfortable every now and then. For perchance, being seen as committing "politically incorrect" offenses in his particular realm of thought, his peers might thereby conclude him to be somehow lacking in the objectivity demanded by his discipline. Maybe Wolfram thinks he must tread a fine line, if he wants what passes for "respectability" among his peers these days....

But in the end, I suspect his entrepreneurially-gained personal wealth can both shelter him intellectually and provide the wherewithal to pursue his projects independently, if need be.

One might think it quite odd that a great scion of the Western intellectual tradition such as (it seems clear to me at least) Stephen Wolfram would find himself in the pantheist camp.

Alamo-Girl, there is something rather strange and ironic in Wolfram’s “Buddhist business,” to my way of thinking at least. In the first place, human thinking doesn’t much matter in the Buddhist universe, at least in terms of social relations, or relations to the wider world. Any thinking that is being committed at all under such a thought regime is, in a way, designed to extinguish thought itself which, if considered as such at all, is usually identified as a reliable source of human pain.

Next, take a look at the globe under the aspect of human history. Ask yourself: In which human culture(s) did science and technology arise and find lasting sustenance and consequence? And in which culture(s) did science and technology fail to develop at all, until quite modern times -- and then only by virtue of cultural transmission from the West?

I’ve “spilled the beans” in the paragraph immediately above, haven’t I? Still, fact is, science and technology are not the intellectual offspring of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, or even Zen (although Zen may have interesting insights to afford to logic).

Science and technology have their root in the intellectual and moral traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (As to the latter, Aristotle may never have made it into the Western tradition, had it not been for the “transmission belt” from great Arab thinkers such as Averroes and Alcinna.)

All of the immediately above-named cultures (I should say spiritual communities, united by their shared convictions regarding the One True God -- the “I Am That Am” that is the mysterious but fundamentally Personal -- that is, supemely intelligent and willing god -- hold that God and His creation to be quite distinct entities. God is neither contained nor constrained by the rules he makes. The artist stands apart from his creation. You cannot physically locate Picasso in Guernica. Blame Aristotle for first recording this insight if you want to.

Wolfram speaks of intelligence as somehow founding and sustaining the order of the universe, and of his conviction that, at bottom, one simple, fundamental model undergirds and empowers the structure of the universe, and was its original motive principle. The characteristics of this model are quite simple. (1) Its initial conditions are simple. (2) Its rules of conduct are simple. (3) Its model describes a system designed to unfold in time.

What I want to know, A-G, is, given his own criteria, why Wolfram seems not to have considered his own inheritance from Western culture as relevant to his problem, preferring to immerse himself in the “nirvana-dreams” of Eastern mysticism instead?

For given his description of the requirements of the fundamental model he’s trying to realize, sketched at (1), (2), and (3) above, it seems he hasn’t yet considered the major, world-transforming insight that the major cultural constituent of Western civilization has been propounding (and symbolizing) for two millennia by now.

By which I mean: Christianity. Which states (among other things) that: “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was God, and the Word was with God.”

Symbolically, the Word, the Logos, would seem to fulfill Wolfram’s requirements. For from a rational point of view, (1) the Word constitutes the simplest of initial conditions. (2) People who read the Bible know (or should know) how simple the rules of the universe and of human being and existence really are. And (3) The rules were definitely intended to unfold over time.

* * * * * *

I could expound further, A-G. But enuf’s enuf for now. Time “to put a sock in it.” Only just want to add that Wolfram, for all his glory, winds up sounding pretty dismal in the end:

“And while at first [my work] might seem to suggest that the rich history of biology, civilization and technology needed to reach this point would somehow be wasted, what I believe instead is that this just highlights the extent to which such history is what is ultimately the defining feature of the humans condition.”

The “this point” in the immediately preceding paragraph seems to refer to a state of human existence in which human beings have become quite marginal. There have been times reading Wolfram when I’ve imagined he yearns for the day when nanotechnology can replicate human intelligence in all its ramifications, and perform all the important human functions (which subject constitutes an entire universe of inquiry unto itself, the particulars of which Wolfram does not address). Thereby (or so it seems to me) rendering God’s Human Project irrelevant and obsolete.

For man in his book will eventually, ultimately invest the best he has in the machines he creates; and thus render himself and his progeny (assuming he bothers to think about progeny at all) redundant and completely dispensable.

And in the end, man himself effectively becomes a machine in his own right. Just so he can compete with his own creations….

Thank you so much for your engaging and delightful correspondence, Alamo-Girl. God bless, and good night.

Which makes me wonder whether Wolfram is among the deniers of a Creator or just seeming to agree with them. Since he seems to be so well read in so many fields, I think it is doubtful that he does not understand the implications of his work.

Interesting question, gore3000. Certainly Wolfram understands the implications of his work. He writes:

“The idea that there is something unique and special about humans has deep roots in Judeo-Christian tradition – and despite some dilution from science remains a standard tenet of Western thought today. Eastern religions have normally tended to take a different view, and to consider humans as just one of many elements that make up the universe as a whole.”

Related points:

“From the point of view of traditional thinking about intelligence in the universe it might seem like an extremely bizarre possibility that perhaps intelligence could exist on a very small scale, and in effect have spread throughout the universe, building as an artifact everything we see. But at least with a broad interpretation of intelligence this is at some level exactly what the Principle of Computational Equivalence suggests has actually happened. For it implies that even at the smallest scale the laws of physics will show the same computational sophistication that we normally associate with intelligence. So in some sense this supports the theological notion that there might be a kind of intelligence that permeates our universe.”

“The notion that a human mind might somehow be analogous to the whole universe was discussed by Plato and others in antiquity, and known in the Middle Ages. But it was normally assumed that this was something fairly unique to the human mind – and nothing with the generality of the Principle of Computational Equivalence was ever imagined.”

Wolfram appears to be standing in the long shadow of Georg Hegel in these remarks. Like Hegel, Wolfram manages to eradicate any separation between thinker and thought. Intelligence is “thought thinking itself.” The “computation” is everything. What is being “computed,” and who or what is doing the computing, shade off into obscurity, and then disappear altogether….

In the end, what we are left with:

“If the whole history of our universe can be obtained by following definite simple rules, then at some level this history has the same kind of character as a construct such as the digit sequence of pi. And what this suggests is that it makes no more or less sense to talk about the meaning of phenomena in our universe as it does to talk about the meaning of phenomena in the digit sequence of pi.”

Good grief -- talk about reductionism! Talk about pantheistic "meaninglessness"….

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