The formation of different language and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.^67 But we can trace the formation of many words further back than that of species, for we can perceive how they actually arose from the imitation of various sounds. We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation. The manner in which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like correlated growth. We have in both cases the reduplication of parts, the effects of long-continued use, and so forth. The frequent presence of rudiments, both in languages and in species, is still more remarkable. The letter m in the word am , means I ; so that in the expression I am , a superfluous and useless rudiment hasbeen retained. In the spelling also of words, letters often remain as the rudiments of ancient forms of pronunciation. Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same language never has two birth-places. Distinct languages may be crossed or blended together.68. We see variability in every tongue, and new words are continually cropping up; but as there is a limit to the powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct. As Max Mueller69 has well remarked:--"A struggle for life is constantly gong on amongst the words and gramatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue." To these more important causes of the survival of certain words, mere novelty and fashion may be added; for there is in the mind of man a strong love for slight changes in all things. The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection. (Darwin, 1871/1952, p. 300)
Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection. (Darwin, 1859, p. 109)
To my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers,--ants making slaves,--the larvae of echneumonidae [wasps] feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars,--not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. (Darwin, 1859, pp. 242-244)
It is wonderful what the principle of selection by man, that is the picking out of individuals with any desired quality, and breeding from them, and again picking out, can do. Even breeders have been astounded at their own results. . . . Man, by his power of accumulating variations, adapts living beings to his wants--may be said to make the wool of one sheep good for carpets, of another for cloth, &c. (reprinted in Bajema, 1983, pp. 191-192)
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. (Dawkins, 1989, p. 192)
One of the most interesting methods of predicting the future is simulation. You imagine what would happen if you did each of the alternatives open to you. You set up a model in your head, not of everything in the world, but of the restricted set of entities which you think may be relevant. Survival machines which can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. (Dawkins, 1991, p. 217)
A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. Most obviously, she learns the essentials of their language in a matter of months. A large dictionary of words to speak, an encyclopedia of information to speak about, complicated syntactic and semantic rules to order the speaking, are all transferred from older brains into hers well before she reaches half her adult size. When you are pre-programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate, it is hard to shut out pernicious or damaging information at the same time. With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort. (Dawkins, 1993, pp. >>>->>>)
The poet Paul Valéry said: 'It takes two to invent anything.' He was not referring to collaborative partnerships between people but to a bifurcation in the individual inventor. 'The one', he says, 'makes up combinations; the other one chooses, recognizes what he wishes and what is important to him in the mass of the things which the former has imparted to him. What we call genius is much less the work of the first one than the readiness of the second one to grasp the value of what has been laid before him and to choose.'1 (Dennett, 1979, pp. 169)
One does not want to be the generator, then. As Mozart says of his musical ideas: "Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it.' Nor does one want to be just the tester, for then one's chances of being creative depend on the luck one has with one's collaborator, the generator. The fundamental passivity of the testing role leaves no room for the 'creative self'.2 But we couldn't have hoped for any other outome. If we are to have an adequate analysis of creativity, invention, intelligence, it must be one in which intelligence is analysed into something none of whose parts is intelligence, and at that level of analysis, of course, no 'self' worth identifying with can survive. (Dennett, 1979, pp. 187)
Finally, I cannot resist passing on a wonderful bit of incidental intelligence reported by Hadamard: the Latin verb cogito is derived, as St. Augustine tells us, from Latin words meaning to shake together, while the verb intelligo means to select among. The Romans, it seems, knew what they were talking about. (Dennett, 1979, pp. 187)
How could such a process of postnatal design-fixing be accomplished? In only one (nonmiraculous) way: by a process strongly analogous to the process that fixes prenatal design, or inother words, a process of evolution by natural selection occurring within the individual (within the phenotype). . . . The candidates for selection are various brain structures that control or influence behaviors, and the selection is accomplished by one or another mechanical weeding-out process that is itself genetically installed in the nervous system. (Dennett, 1991, pp. 183-4)
Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and replicate at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison. They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable. (Dennett, 1991, pp. 205)
Connectionist models are ultimately evolutionary. They involve the evolution of connection strengths over time. You get lots of things happening in parallel, and what's important about them is that, from a Calvinist perspective, they look wasteful. They look like a crazy way to build anything, because there are all these different demons working on their own little projects; they start building things and then they tear them apart. It seems to be very wasteful. It's also a great way of getting something really good--to have lots of building going on in a semicontrolled way, and then have a competition to see which one makes it through to the finals. (Dennett, 1995, p. 183)
The reason for the rapid advance of the problem-solving capacity of natural sciences is that scientists are trained to introduce theoretical variations, to test them empiricially, and to preserve and propagate those innovations which survive whatever tests have been proposed. (Du Preez, 1991, p. 123)
[HOME] [NEXT]We are still trying to absorb the consequences of this view, which amounts to recognizing that knowledge is based on 'groping' (Piaget)--on variation and selection. . . . Knowledge, since it is based on groping, or on making and matching, is both 'unjustified and unjustifiable' (Bartley, 1987); it canot be shown to be final or derivable from first principles. (Du Preez, 1991, p. 210)