00:00:00.000 Welcome to Topcast, part two of chapter 16 of the beginning of infinity, the evolution
00:00:24.600 I think it was a record I think I got through just a little over one page which is I don't
00:00:32.240 Some people seem to like the comments, some people like the comments and the reading to
00:00:38.120 So today we'll do a little more reading and some commentary as well and try and get through
00:00:45.480 So without further ado, let me go back to the book and David writes on one page
00:00:51.720 Creativity would have been even less noticeable in the predecessor of our species, yet
00:00:56.600 it must already have been evolving in that species, or ours would never have been the result.
00:01:02.560 In fact, the advantage conferred by successive mutations that gave our predecessors
00:01:05.960 brain slightly more creativity, or more precisely, more of the ability that we would
00:01:10.440 now think of as creativity, must have been quite large for by all accounts modern humans
00:01:15.440 evolved from ape-like ancestors very rapidly by gene evolution standards.
00:01:20.040 My ancestors must have been continually outbreeding their cousins, moreover, during the
00:01:24.800 period when creativity was evolving, the ability to replicate memes was evolving too.
00:01:29.960 It is believed that some members of the species hung well erectus, living 500,000 years ago,
00:01:37.120 That knowledge was in their means, not their genes.
00:01:40.320 And once creativity and meme transmission are both present, they greatly enhance each other's
00:01:45.080 evolutionary value, for then anyone who improves something also has the means to be
00:01:50.520 quick the invention to all future generations, thus multiplying the benefit to the relevant
00:01:56.600 And memes can be improved much faster by creativity than by random trial and error.
00:02:01.480 Since there is no upper limit to the value of ideas, the conditions would have been there
00:02:05.320 for a runaway co-evolution between the two adaptations, creativity, and the ability to
00:02:11.520 So we've got a couple of things here, one is that these pre-homosapian species that have
00:02:20.400 existed on the Earth, have done so for a long time.
00:02:23.000 It depends upon how you count what a human species is, but I was looking at this question
00:02:34.400 When humans first of all, it depends on what you mean by human.
00:02:38.000 Is a human a homosapian, or any kind of sort of hominid that is able to creatively explain
00:02:50.000 Now, in a recent podcast that I made almost simultaneously with this, I was talking about
00:02:55.000 the possibility of alien life, and whether or not, here on Earth, the intelligent hominids,
00:03:02.720 and my erectus is one, perhaps in the end, there was another homosapian, certainly us.
00:03:13.760 And that first creative thinking ape of a kind, I'm guessing was a universal explainer.
00:03:19.520 I don't know, but I kind of am with the sentiments that are kind of expressed in the
00:03:27.040 being infinity, which I also mentioned in the last episode that maybe it all came along
00:03:36.160 It wasn't there previously, and then some individual had a mutation, which enabled
00:03:42.840 it, a genetic mutation, which enabled it to explain the world around it, to explain.
00:03:50.760 And that was the first universal explainer, and it had an advantage.
00:03:53.600 It had an advantage, and so it had more offspring.
00:03:57.720 Some of those whom, presumably, maybe all of them had the capacity to explain the world
00:04:02.080 around it, to think creatively, to think better than the other members of its species,
00:04:08.000 although it probably would have been in your species, by now, right?
00:04:10.520 It's hard to know in biology how speciation kind of happens, like, how do you draw the line
00:04:19.560 If a human of a kind, a universally explainer of a kind, is that categorically different
00:04:26.240 to the thing that it evolved from, and the thing that it evolved from, didn't have the
00:04:32.040 And then it's offspring did, then that's a sharp dividing line between these two kinds
00:04:39.120 But when was the first of these kind of creatures?
00:04:41.120 This first human type creature's well, you know, I know it's not the source of all
00:04:46.120 wisdom, but Wikipedia puts the hominids back at six million years, but it calls the first
00:04:53.080 kind of human, homohabillus, 2.5 million years ago.
00:04:58.760 And homo erectus came after that, and then there are various other homo species leading
00:05:02.800 to us homo sapiens, which the estimates vary, but it could be as much as 800,000 years
00:05:12.880 Now, what would the first universal explainer branch off into different species?
00:05:19.000 Well, again, this is purely my conjecture, well, it could happen the same way that any other
00:05:25.920 This first universal explainer has children, they have children, and so on.
00:05:30.880 We end up with a big tribe, eventually the tribe gets very, very big and splits into two
00:05:36.080 factions, which don't like one other, it become hostile to one other, and so they spread
00:05:39.880 apart a long, long way apart for a long, long time.
00:05:43.320 They exist separately, they are separated perhaps by a river, perhaps by a mountain range,
00:05:48.920 They evolved in Africa, they all evolved in Africa, they might have been separated.
00:05:52.280 By a long way, for a long time, it eventually became two different species, as our
00:05:57.080 And perhaps even those two species themselves split into various species, and you could
00:06:01.040 have ended up with lots of different human species, all of whom were able to think creatively.
00:06:06.480 None of human were actually using the creativity for anything particularly interesting
00:06:10.320 or useful, as David will come to, but nonetheless, they're different human species
00:06:14.920 with the ability to universally explain the world, to be actually people, they are actually
00:06:21.240 But only one of them survived through to the day, Homo sapiens.
00:06:25.640 Well, we can talk about that, okay, and maybe get back to the book otherwise I will end
00:06:30.560 up going on, I have a long entire age like last time, and we won't get through enough
00:06:35.160 of this chapter, which is supposed to interesting not to discuss.
00:06:39.920 But let's go back to the book, and now we're just skipping a bit there where David simply
00:06:44.520 talks about how these early people just aren't making much progress, they're not making
00:06:51.920 I urge you to read your chapter because I won't read the entire chapter.
00:06:56.920 Their ability, so these early people's ability to innovate, was increasing rapidly, but
00:07:05.280 Not because it is odd behavior, but because it innovation was that rare, how could there
00:07:09.320 have been a differential effect on the reproduction of individuals with more or less
00:07:15.800 That there were thousands of years between noticeable changes, presumably means, that in
00:07:20.360 most generations, even the most creative individuals in the population would not have been
00:07:27.400 Hence, their greater ability to innovate would have caused no selection pressure in their
00:07:33.720 Why did tiny improvements in that ability keep spreading rapidly through population?
00:07:37.960 Our ancestors must have been using their creativity and using it to which limits and frequently
00:07:42.800 force something, but evidently not the innovation.
00:07:48.640 Of course, they're just my emphasis here, so what David is saying is that we have these
00:07:56.440 people, these people who can innovate, they've got the capacity to create, they are,
00:08:04.400 So they've got a combination of things, some useful memes, perhaps, I probably guess less
00:08:11.960 So they're not innovating, not creating new technologies, they're not improving their
00:08:17.800 But they are nonetheless using creativity, they have to have been using the creativity,
00:08:25.320 If you've been listening to this series and you've been reading the book along with me,
00:08:29.080 you'll know the answer, you'll know the answer, but before we get to the answer, David's
00:08:31.840 going to say a little bit about what the answer might not be, and he writes.
00:08:35.520 One theory is that it did not evolve to provide any functional advantage, but merely through
00:08:41.480 People were used it to create displays, to attract mates, colorful clothing, decoration,
00:08:47.600 A preference to mate with the individuals with the most creative displays, co-evolved
00:08:52.280 with the creativity to meet that preference in an evolutionary spiral.
00:08:56.480 So the theory goes, just like pee hens' preference for peacocks' tails.
00:09:01.160 But creativity is an unlikely target for sexual selection.
00:09:05.000 It is a sophisticated adaptation, which, to this day, we are unable to reproduce artificially,
00:09:10.480 so it is presumably much harder to evolve than attributes like coloration, or the size
00:09:15.560 and shape of body parts, some of which it is thought did indeed evolve by sexual selection
00:09:22.480 Creativity, as far as we know, evolved only once.
00:09:27.240 Moreover, its most visible effects are cumulative.
00:09:29.760 It will be hard to detect small variations in the creativity of potential mates on any
00:09:33.520 one occasion, especially if that creativity was not being used for practical purposes.
00:09:38.120 Despite how hard it would be today to detect tiny genetic differences in people artistic
00:09:42.760 abilities by means of an art competition, in practice, any such differences would be swamped
00:09:50.600 There is a single sentence there, which I emphasised, which I think many people would
00:09:55.080 perhaps skip over, but which I take to heart, where David writes, creativity as far
00:10:02.960 If that is true, and it may or may not be, wow, wow, because if it did happen, then you
00:10:11.600 can consult my recent episode about alien life, are we alone.
00:10:17.000 Where I mention an academic, so if you are not going to listen to that, I will mention
00:10:20.560 it now, it kind of steals the thunder from the other episode, but no, well, that other
00:10:25.200 academic is Peter Slowzak, so philosopher, and basically he agrees, he agrees that maybe
00:10:33.720 something like creativity, human creativity, evolved only once on a planet, which means
00:10:37.440 it is not a convergent feature of evolution, which means it is not arising here and everywhere
00:10:42.200 like wings do, birds have wings, insects have wings, certain kinds of mammals have wings
00:10:47.880 even fish have wings, so wings evolve, commonly, to fill a niche in the environment,
00:10:56.120 But this creativity doesn't seem to, it's evolved once, why, who knows, maybe it's just
00:11:00.600 a quirky thing, and it will never evolve again, it's just a one in a trillion, trillion, trillion,
00:11:06.800 trillion, trillion, trillion, you know, a chance, now if you think that that can't be the
00:11:10.080 case, we'll just think about the fact that there appears to evolve only once, and if you
00:11:14.640 trace backwards in time, the fact that it evolved only once, all the way back to bacteria,
00:11:21.160 so there's a sequence of evolutionary steps sort of led from bacteria, the simplest
00:11:25.320 life that we know of, it's pretty human, it's the most complicated sort of life form that
00:11:31.480 Imagine there's only a hundred steps, but of course there's more than a hundred steps,
00:11:34.520 and imagine each of those steps only has a one in ten chance of occurring, then you've
00:11:37.240 got a one in ten to the power of a hundred chance of repeating that sequence of evolutionary
00:11:42.800 steps in order to get to creativity, because it apparently is what is required, whilst my
00:11:50.760 It apparently is what is required in order to evolve creativity.
00:11:56.400 This unique set of steps, it appears to be unique, you know, if it wasn't unique then
00:12:00.480 it should have appeared other places at other times independently, so if it is unique
00:12:05.360 and there if there is only one route there, or a very very limited number of routes in
00:12:09.600 order to get to evolution, in order to get to creativity, given the precursor of bacteria,
00:12:16.840 okay, and then the steps going through more and more complicated life forms, until you get
00:12:20.800 to a human, I am belaboring the point, but the reason I mentioned it here is it comes to
00:12:26.080 bear on that alien life question, because if it is truly unique then it is truly unique
00:12:30.880 and it wouldn't matter how many planets you've got out there seeded with bacteria, none
00:12:40.400 And that's why we're alone, that's the simple answer to the Fermi Paradox.
00:12:43.400 Now as I said in the other episodes, well, I don't believe that, but that's not to say
00:12:47.800 that I believe there are aliens out there either, I don't believe either of those things,
00:12:51.000 I don't believe there are aliens, I don't believe there aren't aliens, I have no strong
00:12:56.240 views on the matter in any way, I just know that each of these different ways of looking
00:13:01.080 at the question are criticisms of each other, and they all seem good in many ways, and
00:13:07.160 until we have more evidence, more interesting problems out there to solve, with respect
00:13:14.040 to this question, there's not much to say, well I guess there's a lot to say, there's
00:13:18.560 nothing to say in terms of our knowledge of exactly what's going on, there's just a lot
00:13:24.840 of unknowns, lots and lots of unknowns, and it's very interesting unknowns, with some interesting
00:13:31.200 arguments, but very little knowledge and certainly no reason to believe any of these
00:13:36.560 particular competing conceptions or ideas about alien life, and if you're interested in this
00:13:42.520 question of alien life, which comes to bear on this particular thing here, whether or not
00:13:46.520 creative you will evolve elsewhere in the universe, then yes, my other episode, you know,
00:13:51.840 released, maybe not necessarily alongside this one, but close to this one, is perhaps worth
00:13:57.080 listening to, or of interest to you, okay, let's get back to the book, skipping a little
00:14:00.840 bit, and David goes on to say, a more plausible variant of the sexual selection theory
00:14:05.720 suggests that people choose mates according to social status rather than favoring
00:14:08.840 creativity directly, perhaps the most creative individuals were able to gain status more
00:14:14.280 effectively through intrigue or other social manipulation.
00:14:17.480 This could have given them an evolutionary advantage without producing any progress,
00:14:20.840 which we would see evidence of, however, all such theories still face the problem of explaining
00:14:26.240 why, if creativity was being used intensively for any purpose, it was not also used for
00:14:31.400 functional purposes. Why would a chief who had gained power through creative intrigue not
00:14:36.240 be thinking about better spheres for hunting? Why wouldn't a subordinate who invented
00:14:40.360 such a thing have been favoured? Similarly, wouldn't potential mates who were impressed
00:14:44.840 by artistic displays also have been impressed by practical innovations? In any case, some
00:14:49.640 practical innovations would themselves have helped the discoveries to produce better
00:14:53.360 displays, and innovations sometimes have reached a new skill of making a string of decorative
00:14:58.280 beads in one generation might become the skill of making a slingshot in the next.
00:15:03.360 So why were practical innovations originally so rare?
00:15:07.560 From the discussion in the previous chapter, one might guess that it was because the tribes
00:15:11.440 or families in which the people were living were static societies, in which any noticeable
00:15:16.760 innovation would reduce one status and hence, presumably one's eligibility to mate. So how
00:15:22.960 does one gain status, specifically by exercising more creativity than anyone else, without
00:15:28.040 becoming noticeable as a taboo violator, pausing there because we're about to get to
00:15:33.200 David Dote's brilliant, unique discovery suggestion here, but I think it's a is the best
00:15:43.000 explanation I've heard of. So just to tie this up as we get to the decision, the problem,
00:15:49.680 the problem is we have creative people in the past, these creative people in the past
00:15:56.880 have the capacity to innovate, but they're not innovating in any way we have any evidence
00:16:02.160 for whatsoever, they haven't innovated much. So what are they using their creativity
00:16:07.440 for? They can't be using it in order to change things too much because these people would
00:16:13.920 have existed in a static society and then you'll be seen as a taboo violator, you'll
00:16:18.640 be seen as someone who needs to be cast out of such a society, your unholy or unworthy
00:16:25.720 in some way because you're not adhering to the strictures of the society, the customs and
00:16:30.920 traditions. So what if David Dote has, David Deutsch's solution to this? He says, quote,
00:16:38.880 I think there is only one way, it is to enact the society's means more faithfully than
00:16:44.640 the norm, to display exceptional conformity and obedience, to refrain exceptionally well
00:16:50.800 from innovation. A static society has no choice but to reward that sort of conspicuousness.
00:16:56.080 So can enhance creativity, help want to be less innovative than other people? That turns
00:17:01.280 out to be a pivotal question to which I shall return below, but first I must address a second
00:17:06.400 puzzle causing that. So isn't that great? This whole idea, which I did still the thunder
00:17:12.640 from in a previous episode, but what we're saying here is, what David's saying here is,
00:17:17.920 that innovation, the capacity to innovate can be used to more faithfully entrench the existing
00:17:25.600 norms. So if you, and it still happens today, we know there is kind of cultures and in
00:17:31.520 fact we probably live in a version in some ways of these cultures, people who more faithfully
00:17:39.320 adhere to the traditions and cultures that they find themselves in, because that gives
00:17:45.040 them status in such a society. So if your society is making no progress and is just going
00:17:52.400 through rituals of a kind, religious rituals of a kind, not improving anything, the way
00:17:57.440 to stand out in such a society, because you don't want to stand out by doing something new
00:18:03.200 and creative, it's to do the thing that everyone else is doing, but better than they're
00:18:08.560 doing it. So if you have to mold your hair in a particular way, if you mold your hair in a way
00:18:14.880 that's just like that, but better without even a hair out of place, where someone else had one
00:18:20.320 hair out of place and you have none, then you're doing even better. Okay, let's go back to the book.
00:18:25.920 His second puzzle, David's second puzzle for this chapter, and it's subtitled, how do you replicate
00:18:32.560 a meaning in David writes? Meme replication is often characterized, for example by Blackmore
00:18:39.120 as imitation, but that cannot be so. A meme is an idea and we cannot observe ideas inside other people's
00:18:45.520 brains, nor do we have the hardware to download them from one brain to another like computer
00:18:50.080 programs, nor to replicate them like DNA molecules. So we cannot literally copy or imitate memes.
00:18:56.480 The only access we have to their content is through their holders' behaviour,
00:19:00.240 including their speech, and consequences of their behaviour, such as their writing.
00:19:04.640 Meme replication always follows this pattern. When observes the holders' behaviour,
00:19:09.360 directly or indirectly, then later, sometimes immediately, sometimes after years of such
00:19:14.080 observation, memes from the holders' brains are present in one's own brain. But how do they get there?
00:19:20.560 It looks a bit like induction, does it not? But induction is impossible.
00:19:24.880 The process often seems to involve imitating the holders. For instance, we learn words by
00:19:29.600 imitating their sounds. We learn how to wave by being waved to and imitating what we see.
00:19:34.880 Thus outwardly, and even to our own introspection, we appear to be copying aspects of what other
00:19:40.800 people do, and remembering what they say and write. This common sense misconception is even
00:19:46.080 corroborated by the fact that our species closest living relatives, the great apes, also have a
00:19:51.600 much more limited but nevertheless striking ability to imitate. But as I shall explain,
00:19:57.280 the truth is that imitating people's actions and remembering their utterances could not
00:20:01.520 possibly be the basis of human meme replication. In reality, those play on the small,
00:20:07.520 and for the most part, in a central role. Meme acquisition comes so naturally to us,
00:20:12.960 that it is hard to see what a miraculous process it is, or what is really happening.
00:20:17.920 It is especially hard to see where the knowledge is coming from. There is a great deal of
00:20:23.120 knowledge in even the simplest of human memes. When we learn to wave, we learn not only the gesture,
00:20:30.720 but also which aspects of the situation made it appropriate to wave, and how and to whom.
00:20:36.720 We are not told most of this yet we learn it anyway. Similarly, when we learn a word,
00:20:41.600 we also learn its meaning, including highly inexpensive subties. How do we acquire that knowledge,
00:20:47.680 not by imitating the holders? Paul said it is my reflection, so he is really setting this up
00:20:54.240 really well. And thoroughgoing Papurians may have guessed the answer. I will probably read the book
00:21:02.160 anyway, if they are listening to this. But the fact is that we manage to gain this knowledge from
00:21:10.080 people. We gain memes. We understand, for example, what waving is, in what situations you do
00:21:17.840 the waving and the kind of inexpensive knowledge that a wave can convey. If I am doing this,
00:21:24.640 then that has a certain amount of inexpensive knowledge in it. I sort of look a bit awkward
00:21:30.480 doing that. But to try and explain exactly how I look in words, it is not my eyes or a bit
00:21:37.840 of my eyes. I can do all sorts of different waves, can't I? And each of them may have a different
00:21:45.200 look on my face and might be waving my hand faster or slower. And if you had to describe that to
00:21:50.800 someone later on, you might say, Brit was waving in a strange way, well, I don't really know. But
00:21:55.360 we kind of both know when you're waving to someone, whether it's a genuine wave or it's an awkward
00:22:00.400 wave, or a shy wave, or it's an excited wave, etc, etc, etc. But that is what they would
00:22:06.480 mean by in explicit stuff. And you know the situations where you should and shouldn't do the
00:22:11.600 kind of waving. And what your conveyor can convey a whole lot of knowledge can be conveyed
00:22:19.600 by a wave. You can wave people away. You can wave to someone in such a way to say,
00:22:25.280 I acknowledge you over there on the other side of the street, but I don't want to talk to you
00:22:28.800 right now. I'm too busy, okay, for example. There's lots of things that simple gestures and simple
00:22:35.280 words and so on. There's lots of meaning that can be contained within these things. The in-explicit
00:22:41.760 as well as the explicit knowledge that happens to be there. Okay, so that's what David's setting up.
00:22:47.600 How do we acquire the knowledge he's just asked? And he said, not by imitating the holders.
00:22:53.200 Now he's going to talk about Popper and this is just such a wonderful story. So back to the book
00:22:57.360 and David writes, quote, Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by
00:23:03.360 asking the students simply to observe. Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask,
00:23:10.000 what they were supposed to observe? This was his way of demonstrating one of the many flaws
00:23:15.280 in the empiricism that is still part of common sense today. So he would explain to them
00:23:20.560 that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at,
00:23:26.160 what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he would explain that,
00:23:31.600 therefore theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.
00:23:37.840 Popper could have made the same point by asking his audience to imitate rather than to merely observe.
00:23:44.320 The logic would have been the same under what explanatory theory should they imitate?
00:23:49.600 Who should they imitate? Popper? In that case, should they walk to the podium,
00:23:54.720 pushing me out of the way and stand where he had been standing? If not,
00:23:57.680 should they at least try to face the rear of the room to imitate where he was facing?
00:24:02.480 Should they imitate his heavy Austrian accent? Or should they speak an animal voice? Because
00:24:07.200 he was speaking in his normal voice. Or should they do nothing special at the time,
00:24:11.040 but merely include such demonstrations in their lectures when they themselves became
00:24:14.880 professors of philosophy. There are infinitely many possible interpretations of
00:24:20.080 imitate Popper, each defining a different behaviour for the emitator.
00:24:24.560 Many of these ways would look very different from each other. Each way it corresponds to a
00:24:28.480 different theory of one idea is, in Popper's mind, we're causing the observed behaviour.
00:24:33.760 So there is no such thing as just imitating the behaviour. Still less, therefore,
00:24:38.640 can one discover those ideas by imitating it, one needs to know the ideas before one can imitate
00:24:44.480 the behaviour. So imitating behaviour cannot be how we acquire memes.
00:24:49.040 The hypothetical genes that caused meme replication by imitation would also have to specify whom
00:24:54.160 to imitate. Black more, for instance, suggests the criterion may be imitate the best imitators,
00:24:59.280 but this is impossible for the same reason. One can only judge how well someone is imitating
00:25:03.600 if someone already knows who is guessed what, which aspect of behaviour and who's,
00:25:07.760 they are imitating, and which of the circumstances they are taking into account and how?
00:25:12.000 The same holds if the behaviour consists of stating the memes. As Popper remarked,
00:25:17.200 it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.
00:25:21.840 One can only state the explicit content which is insufficient to define the meaning of a meme
00:25:28.240 or anything else. Even the most explicit of memes, such as laws, have inexpensive content
00:25:33.680 without which they cannot be enacted. For example, many laws refer to what is reasonable,
00:25:38.480 but no one can define that attribute accurately enough to say a person from a different culture
00:25:42.960 to be able to apply the definition in judging or criminal case. Hence, we certainly do not learn
00:25:48.080 what reasonable means by hearing its meaning stated, but we do learn, and the versions of it
00:25:53.680 that are learned by people in the same culture are sufficiently close for laws based on it to be
00:25:59.440 practicable. In any case, as I remark in the previous chapter, we do not explicitly know the rules
00:26:04.800 by which we behave. We know the rules, meanings, and patterns of speech of our native language
00:26:09.200 largely in explicitly. Yet we pass its rules on with remarkable fidelity to the next generation,
00:26:16.160 including the ability to apply them in situations the new holder has never experienced,
00:26:21.680 and including patterns of speech that people explicitly try to prevent the next generation
00:26:26.640 from replicating. Paul's there just a little comment there. Yes, this is a remarkable thing
00:26:32.560 about language acquisition that many people who have been involved in, let's say, language
00:26:37.760 teaching have always been fascinated by, and that is that every English speaker, almost a
00:26:46.320 English speaker, inexplicably knows the rules of English grammar. When you hear a grammatically
00:26:52.880 incorrect sentence, almost everyone can recognise it, however, it's not necessarily the case
00:27:00.400 that everyone can explain what the error might be. To someone speaking English, learning to speak
00:27:06.640 English from another culture, you might be entertaining them in your house, and you might say,
00:27:14.400 have you had a drink yet? They might say in response, I have a drink, and you don't know what they
00:27:20.080 mean. Do they mean they have had a drink, which is the past perfect tense? Do they mean they
00:27:27.920 want to have a drink? I would like to have a drink, but they've said I have a drink in response
00:27:33.520 to your question, have you had a drink? Whereas a native English speaker will say, no, I have not
00:27:37.680 had a drink, or yes, I have had a drink. They explicitly know that this is the way in which
00:27:42.480 you're supposed to respond, but a non-native English speaker who's struggling to understand the
00:27:46.720 language doesn't know the grammar very well. English teachers, people who learn to be English
00:27:53.040 teachers often have to learn explicitly what the rules of grammar happen to be, just so they can
00:27:59.360 explain it to the language learning. This is the past perfect tense, and this is just the past
00:28:04.320 simple tense, and this is the present tense, and so on. They might have to learn these things.
00:28:09.360 So they can make the in-explicit explicit, in some cases, making the in-explicit explicit is helpful
00:28:16.480 for learning. Sometimes it might not be helpful for learning. You know, language learning and teaching
00:28:20.800 is a certainly a fought area. I did it for quite a while, and this issue about how we pass on
00:28:30.080 these rules with remarkable fidelity and next generation can be a great mystery. All the
00:28:36.640 things about pronunciation of words, you know, the sounds and something, they become deeply ingrained
00:28:43.040 over time, and some people just appear to have better ears for learning languages. I know I'm
00:28:48.160 terrible. If the language starts to deviate too much from the typical sounds that an English speaker
00:28:54.000 will speak, I seem not to be able to get my mouth in the right position because there's a,
00:28:59.200 in fact, that goes into phonetics. There's a huge amount of in-explicit content where your tongue
00:29:05.360 actually has to be when you make certain sounds in certain other cultures. I've tried to learn
00:29:09.280 Korean, I'm absolutely terrible at it, because the tongue has to be in different places. It has to
00:29:13.280 be closer or further away from the teeth than what we use in English, and so this can be hard,
00:29:19.680 because Koreans, of course, naturally in explicit knowledge know where the tongue has been.
00:29:28.880 The entire alphabet in Korean, interesting enough, is it's an alphabet, kind of like English,
00:29:35.040 except the characters, some of the characters represent the position of the tongue in the mouth,
00:29:40.480 which is really cool and interesting. Anyway, way off topic. Let's go back to the book,
00:29:45.200 and David writes. The real situation is that people need in explicit knowledge to understand laws
00:29:50.480 and other explicit statements, not vice versa. Philosophers and psychologists work hard to discover
00:29:55.280 and to make explicit the assumptions that our culture tacitly makes about social institutions,
00:30:00.400 human nature, right and wrong, time and space, intention, causality, freedom, necessity,
00:30:04.160 and so on, but we do not acquire those assumptions by reading the results of such research.
00:30:09.120 It is entirely the other way round. If behaviour is impossible to imitate without prior knowledge
00:30:14.800 of the theory causing the behaviour, how is it that apes, famously, can ape? They have means,
00:30:20.800 they can learn a new way of opening a nut by watching another ape that already knows that way.
00:30:25.360 How is it that apes are not confused by the infinite ambiguity of what it means to imitate?
00:30:29.760 Even parrots, famously parrot. They can commit to memory dozens of sounds that they have heard
00:30:34.960 and repeat them later. How do they cope with the ambiguity of which sounds to imitate and when
00:30:40.640 to repeat them? They cope with it by knowing the relevant in explicit theories in advance,
00:30:45.520 or rather their genes know them. Evolution is built into the genes of a parrot and implicit
00:30:51.200 definition of what imitating means to them. To them it means recording sequences of sounds that
00:30:57.440 meet some inborn criterion and later replying them under conditions that meet some other inborn
00:31:02.560 criterion. An interesting fact follows about parrot psychology. The parrot's brain must also contain
00:31:07.600 a translation system that analyzes incoming nerve signals from ears and generates outgoing ones
00:31:12.480 that will cause the parrot's vocal cords to play the same sounds. That translation requires
00:31:17.280 some quite sophisticated computation, which is encoded in genes, not names. It is thought to be
00:31:23.120 achieved in part by a system based on mirror neurons. These are neurons that fire when an animal
00:31:28.240 performs a given action, and also when the animal perceives the same action being performed by
00:31:33.280 another. These neurons have been identified experimentally in animals that have the capacity to
00:31:38.560 imitate. Scientists believe that human meme replication is a sophisticated form of imitation,
00:31:45.040 tend to believe that mirror neurons are a key to understanding all sorts of functions of the human
00:31:49.840 mind. Unfortunately, that cannot possibly be so. I'll skip the next little bit because David talks
00:31:56.800 about parrotting, you know, what a parrot does. And the fact that a parrot will parrot anything,
00:32:03.600 it will parrot a dog bark, it will parrot a ringing doorbell. A parrot seems to have no choice
00:32:12.080 about the sound that it makes. In fact, I might put up a more amazing, more amazing than a parrot,
00:32:18.880 I have to say, is the Australian bird, the lie bird. If you've never heard the lie bird before,
00:32:23.520 it is far more impressive than any parrot you'll ever hear. The lie bird will imitate anything.
00:32:29.840 It will imitate anything. And one of the most amazing things that it's imitated is an environmentalist
00:32:34.800 love to use this one. Of course, is the imitation of a lie bird of a chainsaw, a chainsaw, a chainsaw
00:32:44.320 just coming to chop down its habitat. I shouldn't laugh about that. You know, the lie birds are
00:32:49.040 fine in Australia. They're not going extinct or endangered or anything. We've got lots of forest,
00:32:53.200 lots of bushland. But yes, the lie bird will imitate camera sounds. I'll play the clip. If I can find
00:33:01.440 the clip and I'll put it up here. And that's the parrot.
00:33:32.640 Moving on from the lie bird, back to the book after skipping a little bit in David Wright.
00:33:37.840 Now, imagine that a parrot had been present at Popper's lectures and learned to parrot some of
00:33:42.240 Popper's favourite sentences. It would, in a sense, have imitated some of Popper's ideas.
00:33:46.640 In principle, an interested student could later learn the ideas by listening to the parrot.
00:33:51.280 But the parrot would merely be transmitting those memes from one place to another,
00:33:55.040 which is no more than the air in lecture theater does. The parrot could not be said to have acquired
00:33:59.040 the memes because it would be reproducing only some of the countless behaviours that they could
00:34:04.240 produce. The parrot's subsequent behaviour as a result of having learned the sounds by heart,
00:34:09.200 such as its responses to questions, would not resemble Poppers. The sound of the meme would be there,
00:34:14.080 but its meaning would not. And it is the meaning, the knowledge that is the replicator.
00:34:19.040 Then David talks about how the fact that the parrot is not oblivious to the sounds. It doesn't
00:34:24.960 indiscriminately record things like a recorder, electronic recorder, or record everything.
00:34:29.840 The parrot is clearly only recording specific things. And then there goes on to talk about
00:34:36.160 apes. And some of aaping can be so complicated that it appears as if it's learning.
00:34:44.480 So, for example, if one ape learns to crack a nut better than another ape, then the other
00:34:50.720 ape can tend to learn from the first ape that has improved something. Now, the kicker to this,
00:34:57.520 the kicker to the fact that an ape can learn to use a tool, and people are unaccountably
00:35:04.240 impressed by the kind of tool use that goes on among some animals. We have crows in Australia as
00:35:11.280 well, mentioned in Australia, when I think crows exist around the world. But the tool use of the
00:35:16.960 crow is often cited as a particularly impressive example of intelligence in the lower species.
00:35:26.160 David writes how such activities may seem to depend upon explanation on understanding
00:35:30.480 how and why each action that can be complicated, making a tool, or cracking a nut in various
00:35:36.880 contexts by an ape. It seems to be like learning. It seems to be like explanatory knowledge.
00:35:44.400 But, as he says here, quote, in a remarkable series of observational and theoretical studies,
00:35:50.800 the evolutionary psychologist and animal behavior researcher, Richard Byrne, has shown
00:35:56.640 they, the apes, achieve this by a process that he calls behavior passing, which is analogous to
00:36:02.880 the grammatical analysis of passing of human-spatial computer programs. And I won't, I think,
00:36:07.840 I'm just going to encourage people to go and read the book rather than me reading it out.
00:36:11.520 Which seems strange, I mean, I'm kind of taking out the punchline of this, but there is this
00:36:15.840 thing called behavior passing, where it's not like conjecture and refutation. It is instead
00:36:26.320 how there's already a repertoire of possible behaviors that an ape can undertake. And within
00:36:33.040 these, this repertoire, it's like a library of possible different things that this creature
00:36:40.080 can undertake, then they can be combined in different ways in order to do something that
00:36:48.000 is might not have been encountered before by any members of those species.
00:36:52.320 And as David says over this behavior passing and it's worth looking out, behavior passing is a
00:36:57.440 very inefficient method requiring a lot of watching of behaviors that a human could mimic almost
00:37:02.960 immediately by understanding their purpose. Also, it allows only a few fixed options for connecting
00:37:08.160 the behaviors together. So only relatively simple memes can be replicated.
00:37:12.080 Apes can only copy certain individual actions instantly, the ones of which they have pre-existing
00:37:17.680 knowledge through their myriad neuron system, but it takes them years to learn a repertoire of
00:37:22.400 memes that involve combinations of actions. And then I'm skipping yet more, because I just want
00:37:28.240 to get to this section about how humans are different. They're not just imitating behavior
00:37:34.080 as an ape would or as a parrot would, okay? We're categorically different. How? Because David says
00:37:40.640 quote, human beings acquiring human memes are doing something profoundly different when an audience
00:37:47.200 is watching a lecture or a child is learning a language, their problem is almost the opposite of
00:37:51.920 that of parrotting or aping. The meaning of the behavior that they are observing is precisely
00:37:57.680 what they are striving to discover and do not know in advance. The actions themselves and even the
00:38:02.720 logic of how they are connected are largely secondary and are often entirely forgotten afterwards.
00:38:08.000 For example, as adults we remember, few of the actual sentences from which we learn to speak.
00:38:14.000 If a parrot had copied snatches of poppers voice at a lecture, it would certainly have copied
00:38:19.440 them with his Austrian accent. Parrots are incapable of copying an utterance without its accent.
00:38:27.280 But a human student might well be unable to copy it with the accent. In fact,
00:38:32.080 the student might well acquire a complex meme in a lecture without being able to repeat a single
00:38:36.000 sentence spoken by the lecturer, even immediately afterwards. In such a case, the student has replicated
00:38:41.760 the meaning, which is the whole content, of the meme without imitating any actions at all.
00:38:47.440 As I said, imitation is not the heart of human meme replication. Okay, so I'm going to pause and
00:38:54.640 I'm going to end there today, maybe a little bit shorter than all, but I actually have made
00:38:58.560 three podcast episodes today. There's one out there, which is just me talking to camera
00:39:05.200 not reading about aliens. One there, which is a more carefully considered piece about cosmology
00:39:14.240 and the effect on economics that cosmology has. And finally, this one today. So it's been a bit
00:39:19.280 of my voices starting to go. So if you've enjoyed this, if you've enjoyed any of my other
00:39:24.640 podcasts, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. It's very valuable to me, very heartening
00:39:31.840 that I've increased. My number of supporters, I'm up over 20 now, which is very heartening
00:39:37.840 for me. I'm very much enjoying doing this and we'll have a few more episodes for this chapter
00:39:45.280 and move on to the next chapter. Unsustainable, which will be an exciting, a very exciting
00:39:51.200 chapter. I'm not to say this is an exciting, we're getting rid of this anywhere, taking our time,
00:39:55.840 getting through it, but unsustainable will be a, I don't want to say controversial,
00:40:03.040 but it'll be a fun chapter when we do a mention of it. Thank you again to everyone who's watching,
00:40:08.400 everyone who's listening and to all of my Patreon subscribers. Until next time, bye-bye.
