The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (68 page)

It is not known
why
parroting evolved. It is a fairly common adaptation in birds, and may play more than one role. But, whatever the reason, the important thing for present purposes is that parrots never have a choice about which sounds to imitate, or about what constitutes imitating them. A ringing doorbell and a barking dog may happen to provide conditions that meet the inborn criterion that initiates parroting behaviour, and, when they do, the parrot will always mimic exactly the same aspects of them: their sounds. So, it resolves the infinite ambiguity by making no choices. It does not occur to it to ignore the dog under those conditions, or to imitate the wagging of its tail, because it is incapable of conceiving of any other criterion for imitation than the one built into its mirror-neuron system. It is devoid of creativity and
relies
on its lack of creativity to replicate the sounds faithfully. This is reminiscent of humans in static societies – except for a crucial difference which I shall explain below.

Now, imagine that a parrot had been present at Popper’s lectures, and learned to parrot some of Popper’s favourite sentences. It would, in a sense, have ‘imitated’ some of Popper’s ideas: in principle, an interested student could later learn the ideas by listening to the parrot. But the parrot would merely be transmitting those memes from one place to another – which is no more than the air in the lecture theatre does. The parrot could not be said to have acquired the memes, because it would be reproducing only one of the countless behaviours that they could produce. The parrot’s subsequent behaviour as a result of having learned the sounds by heart – such as its responses to questions – would not resemble Popper’s. The sound of the meme would be there, but its meaning would not. And it is the meaning – the knowledge – that is the replicator.

The parrot is oblivious to the human meanings of the sounds that it parrots. Had those lectures been not about philosophy but about recipes for fried parrot, it would have been just as eager to quote from them to anyone who would listen. But it is not
oblivious
to the content
of the sound – it is not like a mechanical recorder. Quite the contrary: parrots neither record sounds indiscriminately nor replay them randomly. Their inborn criteria do implicitly attribute meaning to sounds that they hear; it is just that the meaning is always drawn from the same, narrow set of possibilities: if the evolutionary function of parroting is, for instance, to create identifying calls, then every sound it hears is either a potential identifying call or not.

Apes are capable of recognizing a much larger set of possible meanings. Some of them are so complex that aping has often been misinterpreted as evidence of human-like understanding. For example, when an ape learns a new method of cracking nuts by hitting them with rocks, it does not then play the movements back blindly in a fixed sequence like a parrot does. The movements required to crack the nut are never the same twice: the ape has to
aim
the rock at the nut; it may have to
chase
the nut and fetch it back if it rolls away; it has to keep hitting it until it cracks, rather than a fixed number of times; and so on. During some parts of the procedure the ape’s two hands must cooperate, each performing a different sub-task. Before it can even begin, it must be able to recognize a nut as being suitable for the procedure; it must look for a rock and, again, recognize a suitable one.

Such activities may seem to depend on explanation – on understanding how and why each action within the complex behaviour has to fit in with the other actions in order to achieve the overall purpose. But recent discoveries have revealed how apes are able to imitate such behaviours without ever creating any explanatory knowledge. In a remarkable series of observational and theoretical studies, the evolutionary psychologist and animal-behaviour researcher Richard Byrne has shown how they achieve this by a process that he calls
behaviour parsing
(which is analogous to the grammatical analysis or ‘parsing’ of human speech or computer programs).

Humans and computers separate continuous streams of sounds or characters into individual elements such as words, and then interpret those elements as being connected by the logic of a larger sentence or program. Similarly, in behaviour parsing (which evolved millions of years before human language parsing), an ape parses a continuous stream of behaviour that it witnesses into individual elements, each of which it already knows – genetically – how to imitate. The individual
elements can be inborn behaviours, such as biting; or behaviours learned by trial and error, such as grasping a nettle without being stung; or previously learned memes. As for connecting these elements together in the right way without knowing why, it turns out that, in every known case of complex behaviours in non-humans, the necessary information can be obtained merely by watching the behaviour many times and looking out for simple statistical patterns – such as which right-hand behaviour often goes with which left-hand behaviour, and which elements are often omitted. It is a very inefficient method, requiring a lot of watching of behaviours that a human could mimic almost immediately by understanding their purpose. Also, it allows only a few fixed options for connecting the behaviours together, so only relatively simple memes can be replicated. Apes can copy certain individual actions instantly – the ones of which they have pre-existing knowledge through their mirror-neuron system – but it takes them years to learn a repertoire of memes that involve combinations of actions. Yet those memes – trivially simple tricks by human standards – are enormously valuable: using them, apes have privileged access to sources of food that are closed to all other animals; and meme evolution gives them the ability to switch to other sources far faster than gene evolution would allow.

So, an ape knows (inexplicitly) that another ape is ‘picking up a rock’, and not performing any of the countless other possible interpretations of the same actions, such as ‘picking up an object in a given relative position’, because picking up a rock is in its inborn repertoire of copiable behaviours while the other possibilities are not. Indeed, it may well be that apes
cannot
imitate the behaviour of ‘picking up an object in a given relative position’. Note, in this connection, that apes are unable to imitate sounds. They cannot even parrot sounds (repeat them blindly), despite having a complex inborn repertoire of calls that they can make, recognize and act upon in genetically predetermined ways. Their behaviour-parsing system simply did not evolve a predetermined translation mechanism from hearing sounds to uttering them, so they cannot ape them. Consequently there are no customized sounds in any of the apes’ memetically controlled behaviours.

Thus, in the crucial respect that is relevant to meme replication, aping has the same logic as parroting: like the parrot, the ape avoids
the infinite ambiguity of copying by already knowing, inexplicitly, the meaning of every action that it is capable of copying. And it is only capable of associating one meaning with each action that it can copy – one definition of how to perform the ‘same’ action under various circumstances. That is how ape memes can be replicated without the impossible step of literally copying knowledge from another ape. The recipient of the meme instantly recognizes the meaning of each element of the behaviour; and it relates the elements by statistical analysis, not by discovering how they support each other’s functioning.

Human beings acquiring human memes are doing something profoundly different. When an audience is watching a lecture, or a child is learning language, their problem is almost the opposite of that of parroting or aping: the meaning of the behaviour that they are observing is precisely what they are striving to discover and do not know in advance. The actions themselves, and even the logic of how they are connected, are largely secondary and are often entirely forgotten afterwards. For example, as adults we remember few of the actual sentences from which we learned to speak. If a parrot had copied snatches of Popper’s voice at a lecture, it would certainly have copied them with his Austrian accent: parrots are incapable of copying an utterance without its accent. But a human student might well be unable to copy it
with
the accent. In fact a student might well acquire a complex meme at a lecture without being able to repeat a single sentence spoken by the lecturer, even immediately afterwards. In such a case the student has replicated the meaning – which is the whole content – of the meme without imitating any actions at all. As I said, imitation is not at the heart of human meme replication.

Suppose that the lecturer had repeatedly returned to a certain key idea, and had expressed it with different words and gestures each time. The parrot’s (or ape’s) job would be that much harder than imitating only the first instance; the student’s much easier, because to a human observer each different way of putting the idea would convey additional knowledge. Alternatively, suppose that the lecturer had consistently misspoken in a way that altered the meaning, and had then made one correction at the end. The parrot would copy the wrong version. The student would not. Even if the lecturer never corrected the error at all, a human listener might still have a good chance of understanding the
idea that was in the lecturer’s mind – and, again, without imitating any behaviour. If someone else reported the lecture but in a way that contained severe misconceptions, a human listener might
still
be able to detect what the lecturer meant, by explaining the reporter’s misconceptions as well as the lecturer’s intention – just as a conjuring expert might be able to detect what really happened during a trick given only a false account from the audience of what they saw.

Rather than imitating behaviour, a human being tries to explain it – to understand the ideas that caused it – which is a special case of the general human objective of explaining the world. When we succeed in explaining someone’s behaviour, and we approve of the underlying intention, we may subsequently behave ‘like’ that person in the relevant sense. But if we disapprove, we might behave unlike that person. Since creating explanations is second nature (or, rather, first nature) to us, we can easily misconstrue the process of acquiring a meme as ‘imitating what we see’. Using our explanations, we ‘see’ right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people’s behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That is what creativity does. And if we end up behaving like other people, it is because we have rediscovered the same idea.

That is why the audience at a lecture, when striving to assimilate the lecturer’s memes, are not tempted to face the rear wall of the lecture room, or to imitate the lecturer in any one of infinitely many other ways. They reject such interpretations of what is worth copying about the lecturer not because they are genetically incapable of conceiving of them, as other animals are, but because they are bad explanations of what the lecturer is doing, and bad ideas by the audience’s own values.

In this chapter I have presented two puzzles. The first is why human creativity was evolutionarily advantageous at a time when there was almost no innovation. The second is how human memes can possibly
be replicated, given that they have content that the recipient never observes.

I think that both those puzzles have the same solution: what replicates human memes is creativity; and creativity was used, while it was evolving,
to replicate memes
. In other words, it was used to acquire existing knowledge, not to create new knowledge. But
the mechanism to do both things is identical
, and so in acquiring the ability to do the former, we automatically became able to do the latter. It was a momentous example of reach, which made possible everything that is uniquely human.

A person acquiring a meme faces the same logical challenge as a scientist. Both must discover a hidden explanation. For the former, it is an idea in the minds of other people; for the latter, a regularity or law of nature. Neither person has direct access to this explanation. But both have access to evidence with which explanations can be tested: the observed behaviour of people who hold the meme, and physical phenomena conforming to the law.

The puzzle of how one can possibly translate behaviour back into a theory that contains its meaning is therefore the same puzzle as where scientific knowledge comes from. And the idea that memes are copied by imitating their holders’ behaviour is the same mistake as empiricism or inductivism or Lamarckism. They all depend on there being a way of automatically translating
problems
(like the problem of planetary motions, or of how to reach leaves on tall trees or to be invisible to one’s prey) into their solutions. In other words, they assume that the environment (in the form of an observed phenomenon, or a tall tree, say) can ‘instruct’ minds or genomes in how to meet its challenges. Popper wrote:

The inductivist or Lamarckian approach operates with the idea of instruction from without, or from the environment. But the critical or Darwinian approach only allows instruction from within – from within the structure itself . . .

I contend that there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure. We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method
of trial and the elimination of error. As Ernst Gombrich says, ‘making comes before matching’: the active production of a new trial structure comes before its exposure to eliminating tests.

The Myth of the Framework

Popper could just as well have written, ‘We do not
acquire new memes
by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of imitation of, or instruction by, the environment.’ The transmission of human-type memes – memes whose meaning is not mostly predefined within the receiver – cannot be other than a creative activity on the part of the receiver.