Borges, Plato, & Natural Selection

Tomas Luis Borges had an astonishing genius for channeling vast currents in the history of ideas into the narrow stream of a compelling story.  One of his most frequently mentioned stories was “The Library of Babel”.  It begins with these words:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. 

If you haven’t read the story, I am about to do you the terrible disservice of spoiling the end.  I can only offer the defense that many more people have read about the story than have actually read the story. 

The library consists of a vast but not infinite set of books. 

There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say… Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number.

The library consists of all the books that are logically possible, given the parameters just listed.  To say that this library would be vast is meaningful only in the strictest mathematical sense.  It would be, to say the least, astronomical in extent.  Consider that in this library somewhere is a perfect copy of Shakespeare’s Richard III.  There is also a copy of Dickey Three with alternative endings, including one in which the villain is rescued by the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.  There are perfectly accurate histories of the life of every single human being and indeed every single organism along with alternative histories.  In one of them I am married to two Victoria’s Secret models. 

Of course, all of the coherent reads will be only a drop in the bucket.  Most of the books will be incoherent jumbles of nonsense.  One of the books will consist of nothing but the word “word” over and over again. 

This brilliant thought problem, in the form of a librarian’s musings on the bizarre world that he inhabits, is another version of the infamous infinite monkey theorem.  Could a set of monkeys (say 100), typing randomly, eventually produce a copy of Richard III?  According to the theorem, which I believe to be logically sound, the answer is “yes, given enough time”.  However, the time required is unimaginably vast.  Even to produce “Now is the winter of our discontent” would require more time, I recently calculated, than the age of the Kosmos itself.  Along the way you would get a vast number of half finished, garbled, and alternative versions. 

Darwin’s great idea was to explain how you could get Shakespeare himself out of processes just as random as our team of monkeys or Borges’ library.  All you need is some device that persistently steers the primates in the right direction.  If the monkeys keep typing now is the winter over and over again until they get the next letter right and then keep typing that…  That is what natural selection does. 

These reflections were set in motion by wonderful essay in Aeon.  Andreas Wagner, professor in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich and at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, argues that Darwinian evolution could not work without “nature’s library of Platonic forms.” 

How do random DNA changes lead to innovation? Darwin’s concept of natural selection, although crucial to understand evolution, doesn’t help much. The thing is, selection can only spread innovations that already exist. The botanist Hugo de Vries said it best in 1905: ‘Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’…

A metaphor might help to clarify the problem. Imagine a giant library of books containing all possible sequences of letters in the alphabet. Such a library would be huge beyond imagination, and most of its texts would of course be pure gibberish. But some would contain islands of intelligibility – a word here, a Haiku there – in a sea of random letters. Still others would tell all stories real and imagined: not only Dickens’s Oliver Twist or Goethe’s Faust, but all possible novels and dramas, the biography of every single human, true and false histories of the world, of other worlds as yet unseen, and so on. Some texts would include descriptions of countless technological innovations, from the wheel to the steam engine to the transistor – including countless innovations yet to be imagined. But the chances of choosing such a valuable tome by chance are minuscule.

That giant library is, of course, Borges’ library, though Wagner doesn’t give credit here.  He does present the same problem. 

A protein is a volume in a library just like this, written in a 20-letter alphabet of amino acids. And while protein texts might not be as long as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, their total number is still astonishing. For example, a library of every possible amino acid string that is 500 letters long would contain more than 10⁶⁰⁰ texts – a one with 600 trailing zeros. That vastly outnumbers the atoms in the visible universe.

The library is a giant space of the possible, encoding all the proteins that could be useful to life. But here’s the thing: evolution can’t simply look up the chemicals it needs in a giant catalogue. No, it has to inch its way painstakingly along the stacks.

So how does natural selection find the next viable protein sequence?  How does this mindless process find the path that arrives at viable minds? 

For more than a decade, this endeavour has been a focus of my research at the University of Zurich and at the Santa Fe Institute in the US. We evolve molecules in the laboratory and record their journey through these libraries, together with any new and useful texts they find. We also map the locations of millions of molecules that nature’s populations have discovered in their billion-year journey. We use powerful computer simulations to explore those parts of a library that nature has not yet discovered. Through these efforts, we and others have found a system of organisation in these libraries that is as strange as it is perfect for guideless exploration.

One of its features is easily explained once we observe that neighbouring texts in nature’s library have similar letter sequences, and the closest texts – immediate neighbours – differ in just a single letter.

If natural selection had to pick at random from the possible protein sequences, no conceivable time would suffice for evolutionary processes.  But it didn’t have to do that.  The basic molecules on which natural selection works (at the molecular level) open up a large but not vast number of pathways.  Many different directions are open, but only so many.  A library of possible forms is on the same shelf and it is a big shelf, but manageable.  Certain pathways prove very fruitful, and natural selection moves up and down them again and again.  Many different combinations of genes work the same outcomes along a viable pathway. 

The remarkable thing is, having so many different ways to say the same thing means that there are many more possible slips of the tongue. And with each slip of the tongue comes the possibility of saying something different. Just as the word GOLD emerges from a single letter change in MOLD, some neighbours of a text express new meanings. And as the browsers work their way through each synonym for some original text, different innovations become accessible. By creating safe paths through the library, genotype networks create the very possibility of innovation.

Let me put this point as strongly as I can. Without these pathways of synonymous texts, these sets of genes that express precisely the same function in ever-shifting sequences of letters, it would not be possible to keep finding new innovations via random mutation. Evolution would not work.

What Wagner thinks, if I read him right, is that the molecular material that natural selection began to work on from the very beginning of life on earth already contained a large but manageable set of forms.  If it hadn’t, evolution could not have been possible.  He recognizes this library of viable forms to be Platonic.  That makes two of us. 

Science & Politics

It is generally assumed that religion is a cause of political conflict.  That assumption is wrong.  Politics is the cause of political conflict.  Religious controversies drive politically controversies only when theological doctrine and religious practices become part of the self-identification of some political faction and/or, more importantly, when some faction comes to regard certain doctrines or practices as definitive of its enemies.  

Much the same thing is true when we consider the politicization of science.  The political left in the United States often accuses the right of being “anti-science” and the left is right, if you mean that conservative political views often determine what scientific evidence a conservative is willing to accept.  However, according to Erik C. Nisbet and R. Kelly Garrett.  They conducted a recent study of how political bias leads conservatives and liberals to distrust science.  The study is published in the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and they summarize their findings in The New Republic. 

Nisbet and Garrett found that “Conservatives are no more biased about science than liberals are,” to cite the title of the TNR piece.  The authors consider two explanations for the ideological divide between conservatives and liberals over scientific issues. 

The first explanation assumes that conservatives are inherently anti-science as they tend to be more dogmatic and close-minded compared to liberals. They are therefore more “motivated” to reject scientific information that clashes with their world view and distrust its sources (in other words, scientists).

In contrast, the second thesis argues that though there are some nuanced psychological differences between liberals and conservatives, it would be a mistake to overstate them. Liberals are viewed as no less likely to respond to scientific information in biased manner than conservatives.

For instance, liberals and conservatives are equally likely to reject fact-checking messages that contradict misperceptions or believe in false political rumors about candidates they oppose.

I am inclined to accept the second explanation, whether because of brain design or because it happens to confirm my thesis, stated above.  

Unsurprisingly, we found that conservatives who read statements about climate or evolution had a stronger negative emotional experience and reported greater motivated resistance to the information as compared to liberals who read the same statements and other conservatives who read statements about geology or astronomy.

This in turn lead these conservatives to report significantly lower trust in the scientific community as compared to liberals who read the same statement or conservatives who read statements about ideologically neutral science.

Significantly, we found a similar pattern amongst liberals who read statements about nuclear power or fracking. And like conservatives who read statements about climate change or evolution, they expressed significantly lower levels of trust in the scientific community as compared to liberals who read the ideologically-neutral statements.

Biased attitudes toward scientific information and trust in the scientific community were evident among liberals and conservatives alike, and these biases varied depending on the science topic being considered.

As is the case for religious ideas, some scientific ideas are politically significant and some are not.  The former are those around which genuine political factions coalesce. 

There is probably no way to remedy this.  Religious wars in the West were ended not so much by deciding that religion was politically irrelevant as by a collective decision that politics was religiously irrelevant.  We discovered that we are not such fools as to believe that God needs us to save Him.  It will be harder to work that same strategy for science and politics.  Evolution is the right theory or not, regardless of whether a school board in Texas likes it.  Deciding what to do about climate change requires a lot of judgment calls on scientific questions and those calls must be made in political, not scholarly forums. 

Platonic Biology

Theodosius Dhobzhansky famously wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”  I gather that Dhobzhansky, an Orthodox Christian, was arguing against creation scientists and other critics of Darwinian Theory.  I agree with him and will add one more step.  Nothing in Darwinian Theory makes sense except in light of Plato. 

Plato’s Socrates more famously advanced a theory of forms or ideas as a way of making sense of human perception and intelligence.  In a nutshell, the theory goes as follows.  When we perceive a physical object, say a tree, our perception only captures one possible perspective on that object.  Thus the tree looks small from a distance and large up close.  Likewise we see only one side of it at a time.  It is our intelligence, not our perceptions, that informs us that the tree is one object that has not changed as we approach it and circle around it.  That one tree is in fact invisible to the eye and visible only to the intelligence. 

We also notice that the tree itself does seem to change over time‑gray and leafless in November but green and flourishing in June.  Yet it is still this same tree: an object that is one thing and another as it extends across the dimension of time.  Likewise, we recognize this tree and another tree as one and the same kind of thing because our intelligence informs us of a pattern that is more persistent that any individual tree.  Plato (or his Socrates) supposed that the pattern was more real than the example because it was more persistent and more knowable. 

Plato’s many critics as well as his misguided disciples (Neoplatonists, for example) neglected to notice that Socrates usually qualified his speculations by saying that it is only “something like this”.  I think that it is indeed something like this and that a qualified but genuinely Platonic approach is necessary to make sense of Darwinian biology. 

I am working on revising a paper I presented last year in Montreal.  You can see critical comments on the paper by Scott James here and my reply to those excellent comments here.  Some sections of the paper and my argument can be found here, here, and here. 

In this post, I will present some examples of Darwinian ideas that are in fact Platonic ideas.  To begin with, consider this argument: if it’s a mammal, then it’s an animal; it’s a mammal, therefore it’s an animal.  That simple, biological modus ponens recognizes this here organism as an expression of a larger object that extends across time and space.  Individual mice and men come to be in dependence on larger forms that are more persistent across evolutionary time and more pervasive across evolutionary niches at any one time.  That is “something like” what Socrates had in mind. 

Evolutionary theory works exactly the same way that Plato’s theory worked: by recognizing that the caterpillar and the butterfly as well as the butterfly and the moth are, in a very real sense, the same things.  What is real is mostly invisible to the eye but visible indeed to the properly educated intelligence. 

To take another example, natural selection is a robust, Platonic idea.  Although we have no Platonic writings about mathematics, he clearly thought that training in math was essential for philosophy and regarded mathematical concepts as among the most important ideas.  Natural selection is a logical rather than strictly mathematical principle, but it works the same way as such explicit Platonic ideas as justice and the good.  Natural selection is the same thing whether it is shaping pathogens or pacifists, liver cells or lush barflies. 

I will close here with one final example: the pied flycatcher.  The male of this avian species attracts females with the implicit promise he will help provide for her and her young once they are hatched.  He often makes the same promise to a second female, but there is only some much time he can invest and the second female will find that she is cheated.  The female that he supports will spend more time warming eggs and chicks with a payoff of four or five healthy progeny.  The cheated female will be lucky if one or two survive.  The logic of fidelity and adultery are the same whether we are talking about avians or apes.  I am not sure whether Plato would be pleased to admit adultery among the ideas, but this Platonist has no problem. 

In my paper, I argue that political autonomy is another expression of biological autonomy.  All living organisms build walls between inside and outside, self and not-self, and maintain what is inside in resistance against what is outside.  Life is a Russian doll of coalitions, cells in organs, organs in bodies, individuals in tribes.  At every level, the Platonic idea of autonomy is expressed.