Coyne: Appearance of Human Intelligence Contingent
by BilboWell, I finished Jerry Coyne's review. I found most interesting (and convincing) his argument that human intelligence was probably not inevitable, but highly contingent:
Miller and Giberson are forced to this view for a simple reason. If we cannot prove that humanoid evolution was inevitable, then the reconciliation of evolution and Christianity collapses. For if we really were the special object of God's creation, our evolution could not have been left to chance. (It may not be irrelevant that although the Catholic Church accepts most of Darwinism, it makes an official exception for the evolution of Homo sapiens, whose soul is said to have been created by God and inserted at some point into the human lineage.)
The difficulty is that most scientists do not share Miller's certainty. This is because evolution is not a repeatable experiment. We cannot replay the tape of life over and over to see if higher consciousness always crops up. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking that the evolution of humanoids was not only not inevitable, but was a priori improbable. Although convergences are striking features of evolution, there are at least as many failures of convergence. These failures are less striking because they involve species that are missing. Consider Australia again. Many types of mammals that evolved elsewhere have no equivalents among marsupials. There is no marsupial counterpart to a bat (that is, a flying mammal), or to giraffes and elephants (large mammals with long necks or noses that can browse on the leaves of trees). Most tellingly, Australia evolved no counterpart to primates, or any creature with primate-like intelligence. In fact, Australia has many unfilled niches–and hence many unfulfilled convergences, including that prized "humanoid" niche. If high intelligence was such a predictable result of evolution, why did it not evolve in Australia? Why did it arise only once, in Africa?
This raises another question. We recognize convergences because unrelated species evolve similar traits. In other words, the traits appear in more than one species. But sophisticated, self-aware intelligence is a singleton: it evolved just once, in a human ancestor. (Octopi and dolphins are also smart, but they do not have the stuff to reflect on their origins.) In contrast, eyes have evolved independently forty times, and white color in Arctic animals appeared several times. It is hard to make a convincing case for the evolutionary inevitability of a feature that arose only once. The elephant's trunk, a complex and sophisticated adaptation (it has over forty thousand muscles!), is also an evolutionary singleton. Yet you do not hear scientists arguing that evolution would inevitably fill the "elephant niche." Giberson and Miller proclaim the inevitability of humanoids for one reason only: Christianity demands it.
Finally, it is abundantly clear that the evolution of human intelligence was a contingent event: contingent on the drying out of the African forest and the development of grasslands, which enabled apes to leave the trees and walk on two legs. Indeed, to maintain that the evolution of humans was inevitable, you must also maintain that the evolution of apes was inevitable, that the evolution of primates was inevitable, that the rise of mammals was inevitable, and so on back through dozens of ancestors, all of whose appearances must be seen as inevitable. This produces a regress of increasing unlikelihood. In the end, the question of whether human-like creatures were inevitable can be answered only by admitting that we do not know–and adding that most scientific evidence suggests that they were not. Any other answer involves either wishful thinking or theology.
As I said, I think Coyne's argument is persuasive. I think people such as Miller and Giberson would have to make something like the following reply: "Maybe human intelligence wasn't inevitable on Earth, but there are probably countless planets in the Universe, where life has or will appear, and human intelligence either would have or eventually will appear on one of those planets, if it hadn't appeared here, already."
March 10th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
So the smartest animal only arose once. That proves its an accident and not inevitable that one animal is the smartest.
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 4:58 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
And eyes are inevitable but not intelligence.
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 5:01 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
And its an accident that capitalism converges towards oligopoly, starting with numerous equal competitors and ending with a only a handful of compeititors – all superpowers.
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 5:06 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
I think you missed the point, its not about 'smartest' it's about 'smart'. There is a chain of critical steps that each seem to have only happened once, the evolution of the cerebellum, the neocerebellum, the neocortex, and the seemingly excessive brain to body weight ratio are all rare. If, for example, these were front-loaded outcomes of evolution you would expect these to be common, not unique.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 10, 2009 @ 7:28 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Since Coyne didn't bother to cite any "scientific evidence" that's "suggests that they were not", would someone like to cite any?
Seems to me that evidence, all evidence, is utterly and perfectly neutral on that score, unless one has some preconceived theology to measure it against. Surely he didn't merely have a literal six-day creation in mind. But since Coyne didn't spell it out, I'm left wondering.
Comment by kornbelt888 — March 10, 2009 @ 7:36 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Why?
Comment by kornbelt888 — March 10, 2009 @ 7:38 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Seriously? You are asking why a front-loaded outcome would be more common than a non-front-loaded outcome? Perhaps you could define what you think front-loading means, because otherwise I'm at a loss to understand the desired response to your question.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 10, 2009 @ 7:47 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Based on what Coyne himself quoted.
Miller and Giberson argue that the evolution of reflective intelligence is inevitable.
Coyne seems to be arguing that Miller and Giberson say that humanoid evolution was inevitable. And that this faulty claim is due to their Christian biases. But that's not what they said in the quoted section.
Comment by Zachriel — March 10, 2009 @ 7:56 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Miller gave a direct reply to Coyne, I believe, though I don't have the link on hand.
Either way, Coyne 'doesn't get' what Miller at least, and likely Giberson, was arguing, or the strength they put behind their claims. But then he's obviously either uninformed or purposefully deceptive when it comes to questions of religion. Ah well, par for the course from the NA set.
Comment by nullasalus — March 10, 2009 @ 8:21 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
In a software simulation, I could program some features to emerge based on less stringent requirements than other features. The ones that required more stringent requirements might emerge a lot less often than ones that required less, depending on how the environment was evolving. Hence my "why?" to you. On what basis is a front loaded feature necessarily more common than a non-front loaded feature?
Comment by kornbelt888 — March 10, 2009 @ 8:34 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Ah, interesting argument. I wonder what Mike's response might be.
Comment by Bilbo — March 10, 2009 @ 8:37 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Todd B,
By the way, the way I see it, all life was front loaded whether or not an intelligence was involved. Evolution, even the blind kind, is not completely random (whatever "random" means, in the first place.) The first life form had a very determining effect on life 4 billion years later. Some of the interesting questions for me are to what degree the "front loading" affected later life, and how and why a designer might have programmed it and exploited it.
Comment by kornbelt888 — March 10, 2009 @ 8:45 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
It seems to me that the increase in complexity in society or nature is not accidental. Over time, more and more innovation are bound to accumulate. A human is unique in how accurately he understands his environment. To understand your environment means to be adapted to it. And it seems that the direction of evolution would be ever-increasing adaptation leading to organisms adapted to the environment to an increasingly high degree, with increasingly complex goal-oriented behavior, increased abilities to model the external cognitively with a greater degree of accuracy, and so on.
from article:
Finally, it is abundantly clear that the evolution of human intelligence was a contingent event: contingent on the drying out of the African forest and the development of grasslands, which enabled apes to leave the trees and walk on two legs.
Drying out of forests sort of seems like an inevitable occurence to me, if this was the one linchpin that caused man to diverge so drastically from other apes.
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 9:04 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Miller opts for theology. Although his new book does not say how God ensured the arrival of Homo sapiens, Miller was more explicit in Finding Darwin's God. There he suggested that the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics allows God to intervene at the level of atoms, influencing events on a larger scale:
The indeterminate nature of quantum events would allow a clever and subtle God to influence events in ways that are profound, but scientifically undetectable to us…
Wow, that seems really lame that he's talking about God cleverly manipulating events at the quantum level. I was under the impression that Miller was a more sophisticated thinker than this.
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 9:12 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Ken Miller did write a reply to Coyne, here.
Miller is a little inconsistent in his book, Finding Darwin's God. At first, he starts to argue that God could have manipulated quantum events, without anyone noticing. But then in his last chapter he argues that God did no such thing, but allowed the Universe freedom.
Comment by Bilbo — March 10, 2009 @ 9:31 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
From Miller's reply:
It's nice to see Miller mangle other people's arguments, and not just Behe's.
Comment by Bilbo — March 10, 2009 @ 9:34 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
What Miller could have said is, "We have evidence of very intelligent non-human creatures existing now. Multi-cellular animals have been around for less than a billion years, and there are another 4-5 billion years to go on Earth. Given all that, the evolution of human-like intelligence seems rather likely."
Instead, Miller distorts Coyne out of all recognition. Scary. But he's done it before, to Behe.
Comment by Bilbo — March 10, 2009 @ 9:47 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Todd Berkephile wrote:
think you missed the point, its not about 'smartest' it's about 'smart'. There is a chain of critical steps that each seem to have only happened once, the evolution of the cerebellum, the neocerebellum, the neocortex, and the seemingly excessive brain to body weight ratio are all rare. If, for example, these were front-loaded outcomes of evolution you would expect these to be common, not unique.
How would you respond to remarks on the great similarity between human and chimp DNA, or for example the article from Drudge yesterday about the chimp that patiently accumulates an arsenal of carefully crafted thorwing stones over several days to hurl at zoo visitors when he gets mad.
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 10:12 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Todd Berkephile -
(Skip that last remark of mine if you want.)
Coyne in the article implied that intelligence of dolphins and octopus was not comparable to humans in any way, and thus could not be viewed as a convergence. Would you agree with that? It seems to me one would have to view it as a convergence to some significant degree Is comparing the intelligence of human and octopii like comparing and elephant trunk to a compound eye? No, obviously there's something very similar going on in the anthropoid and cephalapod intelligence.
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 10:22 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
By Coyne's logic: since a genetic code appears to have only evolved once we should not expect it to evolve again if the tape were replayed.
I would tend to agree with him.
Comment by chunkdz — March 10, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Well, because if it isn't then the front-loading was rather much a failure, wasn't it? For the front-load to be successful it must yield "better than chance" results otherwise you wouldn't call it front-loading. I mean, this seems like a simple matter of definition.
This argument is commonly called the "frozen accident", not front-loading. The frozen accident concept is normally employed by supporters of evolution. IIRC, Mike Gene put forth front-loading partly because the idea of a frozen accident didn't seem an adequate explanation for him.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 10, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Sorry, I've always read your name as "Berkephile" (friend of Berkes?) Just now realized its Berkebile.
I apologize for that.
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Since the eye has evolved 40 times independently can we assume it was front-loaded?
Comment by JT — March 10, 2009 @ 10:34 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
I would agree they are not examples of convergence. Of course the words "in any way" are a bit loaded, but I might accept the slightly more subjective "in any significant way". I'm sure some measure could be devised by which you could compare an octopus and a human but it would likely be something largely irrelevant to his point like, say, neuron connectivity graphs or something.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 10, 2009 @ 10:38 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I might be mistaken, but I think the "toolkit" for development of the eye appears in most of the phyla.
Comment by Bilbo — March 10, 2009 @ 10:39 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Certainly not the same code, but some form of fairly high fidelity digital encoding might be required to obtain any life forms as complex as bacteria.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 10, 2009 @ 10:40 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
No worries, I honestly hadn't noticed until you pointed it out.
It's certainly a better candidate than most things. Of course, since all life as we know it is in an environment where light sensitivity has obvious survival benefits it could also simply be because "what works works."
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 10, 2009 @ 10:49 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
The question is not what's required, it's what would appear if the tape was rewound. By Coyne's logic, a one time event like a genetic code should not be expected.
Comment by chunkdz — March 10, 2009 @ 10:58 pm
March 10th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Sure, if you rewind the tape far enough back the most common result might be no life at all. Wind it back further and the most common result might be the formation of a very different kind of planet rather than the earth. Keep winding back and perhaps our whole galaxy might not have formed. Heck, wind it back to the very beginning and maybe the most common result would have been no universe forms at all.
I think for the normal "wind the tape" thought experiments we are limiting ourselves to results in which life still manages to form. Part of this is most certainly postulating what aspects are necessary verse which aspects could be different.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 10, 2009 @ 11:09 pm
March 11th, 2009 at 12:05 am
It seems to me that it depends on the goal. If the designer's intent was to front-load human-like intelligences in an abundance of species, then I would say that it failed to a high degree (although not completely.) But what if the goal was something along the lines that actually occurred? Leading to a single species with human-like intelligence? Was it a failure? Obviously not. What if the entire sweep if life as we know it was pretty much what the designer had in mind. Obviously, it wouldn't be a failure. So the issue of what is common or not is really a moot point, isn't it?
Comment by kornbelt888 — March 11, 2009 @ 12:05 am
March 11th, 2009 at 9:10 am
You mean what if the designers goal was to exactly mimic the exact outcome that would have occurred naturally had their been no designer? Yeah, that's one super important highly cleaver designer there, not just some extraneous factor tossed in for metaphysical reasons.
Please specify a mathematical model that suggests it is even conceptually possible to front-load a natural system to get exactly one of a desired outcome (or even probably one) in finite time. I can't think of any feasible model with that property; all you're left with is a 'anythings possible' so-so story. I'm afraid the math is against this idea, you would need the sort of designer that continuously tweaks the results.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 11, 2009 @ 9:10 am
March 11th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Todd B:
You mean you have evidence that background noise and an arbitrary collection of laws (set of laws put together absent any consideration for future results — absent intelligent foresight) will produce intelligence? Please share said evidence.
Todd B:
Then you need to think a little harder … or just do some research. I'm surprised you've never heard of evolutionary algorithms.
Comment by CJYman — March 11, 2009 @ 9:34 am
March 11th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Please share why you think these evolutionary algorithms would create one and only one highly unique solution? Oh, they don't? Hum, perhaps you misunderstood the conversation.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — March 11, 2009 @ 11:22 am
March 11th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I'm not sure what you mean by an "arbitrary collection of laws", but there is evidence that the laws of this particular universe account for the evolution of life on Earth, including the evolution of intelligence.
Comment by Zachriel — March 11, 2009 @ 11:49 am
March 11th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
I suspect you are right.
Actually Zach and Allen argued that cells might be "expected" if the tape is rewound, but vertebrates might not. If we accept Coyne's contingency argument that one time evolutionary events should not be expected to arise if the tape is rewound then we should not expect a cell and we should not expect a genetic code.
Comment by chunkdz — March 11, 2009 @ 12:44 pm
March 11th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Aren't you assuming that everything that actually occurred was "naturally" with "no designer"? Has this been conclusively established?
I can't do that. And I doubt anyone else can at the moment. But notice how you shift the conversation away from the question I asked without answering it: Why is a front-loaded feature necessarily more common than a non-front-loaded feature?
Comment by kornbelt888 — March 11, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
March 11th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
(Gen 3:1) Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, "Indeed, has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden'?"
Comment by JT — March 11, 2009 @ 7:38 pm