On Evolution, and the Evolution of Intelligence

During my postdoc at MIT in 2013, one of the pieces of research that stayed with me most was the work of Jeremy England, then a young professor there, who was trying to understand the origin of biological function at the level of physics. Put simply: if we take evolution to explain how species appear and disappear, then at the very beginning — as the world turned from the inorganic to the organic — what principles, what mechanisms, and what interactions with external forces shifted the tendencies of chemical reactions and gave rise to matter with biological function?

By biological function I mean the behaviours that, in the world as it now is, distinguish living matter from ordinary matter. On his university page England explained it like this: a cat falls under gravity, and so does a stone, so falling is not a life-related function. Against that, reproduction, the firing of a neuron, extracting energy from food, using the past and present to predict the future — these plainly have the colour of life about them. Starting from systems far from equilibrium, England explored how a randomly connected network of chemical reactions might, through self-organisation, maximise the efficiency with which it extracts energy from its environment, and used theory and simulation to ask how life arises in the world.

Leaving aside how far the theory is accepted in the field, the research poses a good question: how do we study living systems by the methods of physics? Are there different evolutionary paths, and how would we see them?

That is the end of the serious part. Everything below is one person’s speculation in the after-lunch stupor, with no scientific basis whatsoever. Read it as fantasy.

Evolution is a long process. If we treat the several billion years of the Earth as a single day, then the appearance and flourishing of humans is only the last second of it. We can identify the extinction of a species, but it seems very hard to observe a new one arriving by evolution. So it is entirely reasonable that simulation has become an important tool and method for studying it.

That enormous scale of time reminds me of the discussion Poincaré opens with in Dernières Pensées: if every constant in this world were changing in some way, would we be able to perceive the change? In a computer simulation of evolution, do the equations we put in guarantee that all the constants of nature involved exist in a fixed form? If some constant lies outside our knowledge — the way the speed of light in vacuum did a few centuries ago — then when we run a virtual evolution in a computer, is it possible that the equations governing that evolution violate, to some degree, the properties of those unknown constants, and cause them to evolve within the simulated timescale? If that evolution were slow, would we have any capacity to notice it? Or rather: to what extent would such a change alter, or fail to alter, our interpretation of the results?

Free interbreeding with no external interference tends, under the second law of thermodynamics, towards disorder, diversity and averaging out. Like a plume of smoke in a body of air, which always tends to spread outwards until it gradually disperses. The mixing of life, if nothing constrains it, should likewise develop in the direction of disorder — and so evolutionary theory brings in external energy to account for the appearance of more organised, highly intelligent living things.

If we take intelligence as an important index of evolution, is there a way of simulating that studies and discusses the evolution of intelligence alone? As Alex Pentland points out in Social Physics, one of the important objects of study in sociology is the flow of ideas — ideas move through social networks, change, gather, disperse. If an idea is an indirect reflection of intelligence, can that flow stand in for a kind of evolution of intelligence?

From the other direction, Antonio Damasio insists throughout Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain that because there is no such thing as purely rational fear or judgement, the mind cannot exist apart from the material body of a living thing; a brain in a vat would have no mind. So would a purely computational study of the evolution of intelligence drift away from natural reality? Or how might one combine a real physical body with the study of pure algorithms?

Lately every forum, publication and gathering — formal and informal, official and otherwise — is asking the same question: where AI development is going, and what help or threat it represents for humanity. Set aside that, technically, the threat may still be very distant. If it did come about, would an AI evolve? And would the evolution of an AI be a counterexample to our rejection of Cartesian dualism?

I have gone on at this length because I have been planning to use some enjoyable methods to look, on a computer and quite unacademically, at the process of evolution and at the patterns by which new things and new behaviours appear — with a view to answering some of the questions above. If any of this interests you, get in touch. Perhaps we can start with a flow of ideas.