xxxQUOTES from Zann Gill inxxxx  What Daedalus told Darwin
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxDarwin's dilemma & designing intelligence

The metaphor of Social Darwinism is spent. The great competition for survival of the fittest, has led us to the brink of Garrett Hardin’s sobering prediction — “the tragedy of the commons.” Evolution’s brilliant reprise is Nature’s “world game,” which evolution has been playing all along to create our co-dependent biosphere. The Gaia Hypothesis recognized our whole biosphere as a supra-organism without explaining how it came to be that way. How did it come to be that way? And what are the implications of synergetic evolution for the future of life on Earth?

Species are rapidly going extinct as humans convert their habitats for development. So our present choices matter. We must now face the impacts of our interventions in this self-adapting system — our biosphere — changes in Earth’s environment that we, “civilization,” are making, and what these changes imply for life in the future.

(more quotes from What Daedalus told Darwin below)

The frequency of loops in the origin and synthesis of life invokes one disturbing loop in the transition from life’s origins to its futures. Extremophiles, candidates for original life on Earth, thrive in sewage outfalls, corroding cylinders of nuclear waste, oil spills and effluent. Could human civilization figuratively “rewind the tape” to create a future environment on Earth where these organisms will thrive and humanity will be extinct?

If so, the experiment of evolving advanced life on Earth could be run again “from soup to man” and in another few billion years sentient beings might search the fossils for our remains.

The problems we deem important determine how we explore new frontiers, whether in outer space or in our minds. What we think determines how we act. And how we act has consequences. ________________________________________

Delving into debates about evolution convinced me that random variation and environmental selection through “survival of the fittest” alone was inadequate to model how we think — that a tight coupling exists between how we have misunderstood design and how we have also misunderstood both the origin of life and its evolution. If our understanding of design is restricted to the half domain of top-down design, we have no term to describe how the origin of life occurred. We need to reclaim the word “design” to describe a foundational discipline for understanding the origin of life. Evolution is life’s way of designing itself, bottom up. Life designs itself through recognizing and retaining what works, and discarding what doesn’t work, which complements environmental selection in biasing evolutionary directions.
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If etymology determined meaning, computing, from the Latin com-putare, would mean “to contemplate things” (putare) “together” (com), in essence contemplating collaboration.
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The first (tree-like) problem-solving strategy arrives at a single uniform code through competition and “survival of the fittest” (code), while the second (web-like) strategy arrives at a uniform code through collaboration and sharing information (code).
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If a partial correlation can be drawn between a multi-faceted individual mind working creatively on a problem, and many individuals collaborating effectively together, then observing a collaborative group creative process should shed light on the creative process in individual minds, which cannot be observed.
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By examining how the scientific community designs hypotheses, principles emerge that characterize individual creativity at its peak and group collaboration at its most effective, principles such as collaborative autonomy, harnessing uncertainty, designing tolerance windows, and forming criteria to accept or reject interim results.
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In chess what matters more to the outcome of the game? Is it possible strategies to win the game, or possible strategies to win the game in the mind of the player that will determine the outcome of the game?

Perception participates in creating the next reality. If internal perception is a driving force in evolution, it sits alongside its well-accepted counterpart, the environment, which can only select what survives from what already exists. A strategy may exist as implicit potential, but it is the player who must recognize its value and act on it, making it explicit.
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Does life evolve as its own designer, recognizing patterns to make behavioral choices? If so, when the environment selects which organisms will survive, it assesses life’s behavioral choices — its smart moves.
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Contrasting Zubrin’s expansionist vision with Ward and Brownlee’s vision of our Earth as Ark, perhaps these different views are less significant than the conflicting practical imperatives and future scenarios they imply. The first assumes that our imperative is to expand to new frontiers — to conquer space. The “level” of our civilization will be defined by expansion. The second asserts that our imperative is stewardship of Earth, which will define our self-awareness and the advancement of our civilization.
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Many questions about the origin of life threaten infinite regress. What question might precede that first question? What begat whatever begat whatever begat life? One way to escape infinite regress is to construct a cycle that bites its own tail and so kickstarts itself into existence.

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Why did Nature evolve artists, the intellectually curious, those committed to make a difference in the world — people who make great personal sacrifices to compose symphonies, write books, and pursue their curiosity to discover knowledge? When Eustache de Saint Pierre stepped forward to sacrifice his life to save his town of Calais, did he make a personal statement irrelevant to evolution? Those who sacrifice themselves don’t survive better to reproduce more. Are the most creative, committed individuals mere anomalies, inexplicable as evolution’s products? Or are they clues (as Darwin’s co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, thought) that our common view of evolution is incomplete?
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Does being alive “make meaning” in the world in some broader sense than semantics previously allowed? If so, then intelligence is not life’s sequel, but one of life’s ways of driving its arrow toward complexity.
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Why have we relegated “collaboration” to the specialized niche of higher-level consciousness, while we accept that “competition” occurs throughout Nature? How does making competition a big, universal term, and collaboration a narrow, specialized term restrict what we can understand?
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The living world continually evolves its capacity to detect, discriminate, select, manipulate and synthesize information in order to adapt — to decide what to do next. This capacity for decision-making exists in non-living sensors, designed to detect (but their decision-making was imposed from outside by a Designer), and in life this capacity has evolved from bacteria, able to discriminate and swim upstream in a glucose gradient and antibodies, “recognizing” invading antigens by shape-matching, to chess masters, recognizing patterns evolving on the chess board.
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Although “commitment” at first sounds like a flight from technology to subjectivity, consider what robots may need to accomplish on missions into space. They may need to be able to make sacrifices for each other, or on behalf of the mission, or to enforce each other’s commitments as part of the checks and balances of the complex intelligent system of which each is a part.
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We can lapse into old patterns of nitpicking about terms and debating “what is correct.” Or we can adopt a new frame of reference to entertain a conjecture: What if synergetic evolution offers a constructive way to collaborate aboard this planet? To speculate about our possible futures from a new perspective that is more than an argument, more than a marshaling of evidence, we must reclaim “design.” We must pick up that other oar, so that we can steer our spaceship Earth with both oars into the future.
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If life is partially responsible for is own design (synthesis), while the environment carries out assessment (analysis), then life is a decision-maker in its own evolution, a design integrator as its elements collaborate to create increasingly complex individuals.
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Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without central authority?
............................................................................................Robert Axelrod
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It is more probable that any law, at the knowledge of which we have arrived by observation, shall be subject to one of those violations which, according to Hume’s definition, constitutes a miracle than that it shall not be so subjected . . . . it follows, that the class of laws subject to interruption is far more extensive than that of laws which are uninterrupted.
............................................................................................Charles Babbage
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Variation, whatever may be its cause, . . . is the essential phenomenon of evolution. Variation in fact is Evolution.
............................................................................................William Bateson
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The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
............................................................................................Niels Bohr
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Why has neither AI nor ALife produced artefacts that could be confused with a living organism? Was it a lack of computing power? More computing power has enabled some advances, such as computer vision systems, complex simulations, and Deeper Blue’s victory for computers in chess against the human champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Did we fail to create artificial life because of a lack of complexity?
............................................................................................Rodney Brooks
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Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.
............................................................................................Vannevar Bush
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If pleasures and pains are not just passive experience, if they are indeed effective parts of our central control machinery, . . . an explanation of our behavior without them is incomplete.
............................................................................................Graham Cairns-Smith
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Recovery of the connections between the arts and science is one of our greatest, if un-acknowledged, challenges.
............................................................................................ Simon Conway Morris 
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You do not win battles by debating exactly what is meant by the word “battle.”
............................................................................................Francis Crick
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It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
............................................................................................Charles Darwin
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There is no reason why we should view ourselves as the pinnacle of a process that still has another five billion years to go. What form the next step will take, even what extant species will be involved, are unanswerable questions. What will be recognized tomorrow as a fork organism is a mere terminal twig on the tree of life today.
............................................................................................Christian de Duve
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What would have taken one thousand generations in the past may now happen in a single generation. Biological evolution is on a runaway course toward severe instability . . . . Our time recalls one of those major breaks in evolution signaled by massive extinctions. But there is a difference. The cause of instability is not the impact of a large asteroid or some other uncontrollable event. The perturbation is from life itself acting through a species of its own creation, an immensely successful species, filling every corner of the planet with continually growing throngs, increasingly subjugating and exploiting the world.
............................................................................................Christian de Duve
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Will mutations produce wings like angels, in a human being? If you wanted to develop a race of angels, would it be possible to select for a pair of wings?
............................................................................................Theodosius Dobzhansky
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Could certain microbes, now occupying highly specialized, restricted niches, find the conditions we are creating more favorable and enjoy population explosions that trigger other events inhospitable to us? Changes in the sea in the past few decades should command our rapt attention — the sort of interest one might take in, say, the life-support system of a spacecraft housing all of the past, present, and future of humankind.
............................................................................................Sylvia Earle
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Today we can intervene in, and repair, genetic processes; this capability asks for knowledge that we don’t yet have. Future evolution will be not only on the genetic level; the human mind enables a faster roundabout of development. What happens in the future will involve humankind. Now, as before, the motto of evolution is still survival.
............................................................................................Manfred Eigen
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The human being is one player in a huge game, the outcome of which is, for him, uncertain. He has to make full use of his capabilities to hold his own as a player and not become a plaything of chance.
.....................................................................Manfred Eigen & Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch
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To the question, “What happens to species when environments change?”, the standard post-Darwinian answer became, “They evolve.” . . . Here we have imagination colliding with common sense — and, worse, with empirical reality. . . . By far the most common response of species to environmental change is that they move . . . .
.............................................................................................Niles Eldredge
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It is simply not reasonable to suppose that any single scientist can ever be fully relied upon to hold [a position] with total dispassion. . . . The disputations for which the scientific community is so justly renowned are truly a group-level phenomenon.
............................................................................................Niles Eldredge
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The present would provide an infinite choice of futures if it were not already the projection of a story begun in the past.
............................................................................................Andre Gide
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They can’t possibly get it. All these people who think (fear) that technology will ultimately trump biology have missed the point. They are not even wrong.
............................................................................................Alan H. Goldstein
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The problem of the validity of judgments about future or unknown cases arises, as Hume pointed out, because such judgments are neither reports of experience nor logical consequences of it. Predictions, of course, pertain to what has yet to be observed . . . . What has happened poses no logical restrictions on what will happen.
............................................................................................Nelson Goodman
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At the basis of all this ferment lies nature’s irreducible complexity. Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life’s pool table.
............................................................................................Stephen Jay Gould
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Darwin lived to see his name appropriated for an extreme view that he never held — for "Darwinism" has often been defined, both in his day and in our own, as the belief that virtually all evolutionary change is the product of natural selection.

............................................................................................Stephen Jay Gould
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I believe that the theory of natural selection should be viewed as an extended analogy — whether conscious or unconscious on Darwin’s part I do not know — to the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith.
............................................................................................Stephen Jay Gould
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These machines would be a new form of life, based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules. They could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.
............................................................................................Stephen Hawking
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If we see the circle of interpretation as vicious and look for ways of avoiding it, . . . then the act of understanding has been misunderstood from the ground up . . . In the circle is hidden the possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing.
............................................................................................Martin Heidegger
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As with seeds, much comes from little. . . . Newton’s laws of gravity, or Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetic phenomena, have much in common with the definition of the game. . . . As in games, we uncover possibilities quite unsuspected by the authors. Newton could not have guessed that his equations would reveal the gravity-assisted boost that takes space probes to the outer planets. . . .
............................................................................................John H. Holland
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Think of concepts as stars, and knob-twiddling as carrying you from one point on an orbit to another point. If you twiddle enough, you may find yourself deep within the attractive zone of an unexpected but interesting concept and be captured by it. You may thus migrate from concept to concept. . . taking advantage of their overlapping orbits.
............................................................................................Douglas Hofstadter
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. . .inquiry will ultimately move in the circle to which thinking itself confines us in our thinking. For in thinking about thinking itself, we presuppose thinking and in trying to know what knowledge is, we presuppose knowledge.
............................................................................................Karl Jaspers
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People who know about the dangers still seem strangely silent. When pressed, they trot out the ‘this is nothing new’ riposte — as if awareness of what could happen is response enough. . . . They complain, ‘Your worries and your arguments are already old hat.’
............................................................................................Bill Joy
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The 21st century technologies — genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) — are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of mutations and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these mutations and abuses are widely within the range of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable use of them. Thus we have the possibility, not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self replication. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists. . . . As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understanding in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. . . . But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this?
............................................................................................Bill Joy
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When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution by variation and selection, explaining selection was his great achievement. He could not explain variation. This was Darwin’s dilemma.
............................................................................................Marc Kirschner & John Gerhart
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Those motivated to question Darwin’s theory found its weakest point in the origin of novelty. . . The secret lay in understanding the organism on its own terms.
............................................................................................Marc Kirschner & John Gerhart
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There is nothing supernatural about a linear causal chain joining up to form a cycle.
............................................................................................Konrad Lorenz
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[The key idea behind these new architectures is] emergent functionality. . . . The global behavior of the agent is not necessarily a linear composition of the behaviors of its modules, but instead more complex behavior may emerge by the interaction of the behaviors generated by the individual modules.
............................................................................................Patti Maes
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The theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict that organisms will get more complex. It predicts only that they will get better at surviving and reproducing in the current environment.
............................................................................................John Maynard Smith & Eørs Szathmàry
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According to modern theory, the idea of “revelation” applies to epigenetic development, but not of course to evolutionary emergence, which, owing precisely to the fact that it arises from the essentially unforeseeable, is the creator of absolute newness.
............................................................................................Jacques Monod
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Emergent properties. . . are novelties that follow from the system rules but cannot be predicted from the components that make up the system. The individuals that make up the whole are designated agents. For example, interaction rules of individual insects (the agents) may give rise to the configuration and behavior of swarms (the agents at the next hierarchical level).
............................................................................................Harold Morowitz
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By human standards it could not possibly have been artificial: It was the size of a world. But it was so oddly and intricately shaped, so clearly intended for some complex purpose that it could only have been the expression of an idea.
............................................................................................Carl Sagan
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Between [the] perceiving mind and the perceived world, is there nothing in common? We call them disparate and incommensurable. Nature in evolving us makes them two parts of one mind, and that one mind is our own. We are the tie between them. Perhaps that is why we exist.
............................................................................................Sir Charles Sherrington
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Information only has meaning within a context, and the living context still evades us.
...........................................................................................Ricard Solé & Brian Goodwin
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One common Darwinist error is to purge the future.. .........................
............................................................................................Scott Turner
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What makes you so sure that mathematical logic corresponds to the way we think? . . . The time has come to enrich formal logic by adding to it some other fundamental notions. What is it that you see when you see? You see an object as a key, . . . you see some sheets of paper as a book. It is the word ‘as’ that must be mathematically formalized, on a par with the connectives ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘implies,’ and ‘not’ that have already been accepted into formal logic.
............................................................................................Stanislaw Ulam
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What if [Earth] is utterly unique: the only planet with animals in this galaxy, or even in the visible universe, a bastion of animals amid a sea of microbe-infested worlds? If that is the case, how much greater the loss the Universe sustains for each species of animal or plant driven to extinction through the careless stewardship of Homo sapiens?
............................................................................................Peter Ward & Donald Brownlee
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Was life nothing but chemistry after all?... It soon became apparent that even if living organisms were simply collections of chemicals, they were very clever collections indeed.
............................................................................................Christopher Wills & Jeffrey Bada
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Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.
............................................................................................Edward O. Wilson
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
............................................................................................Edward O. Wilson
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An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.
............................................................................................Edward O. Wilson
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Even Archimedes’ sudden inspiration in the bathtub, Newton’s experience in the apple orchard; Descartes’ geometrical discoveries in his bed; Darwin’s flash of lucidity on reading a passage in Malthus. . . . were not messages out of the blue. They were the final coordinations, by minds of genius, of innumerable accumulated facts and impressions which lesser men could grasp only in their uncorrelated isolation, but which — by them — were seen in entirety and integrated into general principles. . . .
............................................................................................Hans Zinsser
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