#16. The Intermind, Engine of History? [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Statue of Samuel de Champlain, explorer

A Mechanism of Rapid Evolution 

A plausible reason for having a mechanism of rapid evolution is that it permits evolutionary enlargement of body size without loss of evolvability; larger size leads to more internal degrees of freedom and therefore access to previously impossible adaptations. For example, eukaryotes can phagocytose their food; prokaryotes cannot. However, larger body size comes at the expense of longer generation time, which reduces evolvability. A band of high frequencies in the spectrum of environmental fluctuations therefore develops where the large organism has relinquished evolvability, opening it to being out competed by its smaller rivals. 

What I call the intermind would be a proxy for classical evolution that fills the gap, but it needs an objective function to provide it with its ultimate gold standard of goodness of adaptations. Species-replacement group selection could ensure that the objective function is close to optimal. This group selection process takes place at enormously lower frequencies than those the intermind is tracking, because if the timescales were  too similar, chaos would result. For example, in model predictive control, the model is updated on a much longer cycle than are the predictions derived from it.

This genetic intelligence may construct our sociobiology in an ad hoc fashion, by rearranging a knowledge base, or construction kit, of rules of conduct into algorithm-like assemblages. This rearrangement would be blindingly fast by the standards of classical Darwinian evolution, which only provides the construction kit itself, and presumably some further, special rules equivalent to a definition of an objective function to be optimized. The ordinary rules translate experiences into the priming of certain emotions, not the emotions themselves, 

Its Properties 

The set of ordinary rules or intermind would be intermediate in speed between classical evolution and learning by operant conditioning. (All three depend on trial-and error.) The name is also appropriate in that the intermind would be a distributed intelligence, acting over continental, or a least national, areas. Its objective function, which is simply whatever produces survival, will be explicitly encoded into the genes specifying the intermind. (For more on multi-tier, biological control systems with division of labor according to time scale, see "Sociobiology: the New Synthesis," E. O. Wilson, 1975 & 2000, chapter 7.)

Evil Explained

The intermind may account for evil because it is only concerned with survival of the entire species and not with the welfare of individuals.

Evolutionary Mechanisms 

The intermind will have been created by group selection of species. Higher taxonomic units such as genus or family will scarcely evolve because the units that must die out to permit this are unlikely to do so, because they comprise relatively great genetic and geographical diversity. However, we can expect intermind-related adaptations that facilitate the creation of new species, the units of selection. Imprinted genes may be one such adaptation, which might enforce species barriers by a lock-and-key mechanism that kills the embryo if any imprinted gene is present in either two or zero active copies. Species-replacement group selection need act only on the objective function used by trial-and-error processes.

What Are Its Objectives?

In these times, we have come to know that species survival is imperiled by loss of range and by loss of genetic diversity. Thus, the objective function will tend to produce range expansion (exploration in humans) and optimization of genetic diversity. 

However, all this is insufficient to explain the creativity of humans, starting at the end of the last ice age with cave paintings, followed shortly thereafter by the momentous invention of agriculture. The hardships of the ice age must have selected genes for a third, novel component, or pillar, of the species objective function, namely optimization of memetic diversity. Controlled diversification of the species memeplex may have been the starting point for cultural creativity and the invention of all kinds of aids to survival. Art forms may represent the sensor of a feedback servomechanism by which a society measures its own memeplex diversity, measurement being necessary to control.