Life

1
Part 4.
Life
Thinking about Thought
Theories of Brain, Mind, Consciousness
May 5, 2015
Piero Scaruffi
www.scaruffi.com
We are born naked, wet and hungry.
Then things get worse.
('One-liner' signature file found on the Internet)

2
Why does Life matter?
• Only living beings can think
• Do all living beings “think”?

3
How will extraterrestrial life look like?
How will we recognize it as “life”?
Christian Nyby: The Thing From Another World (1951)
Edgar Ulmer: The Man from Planet X (1951)
Jack Arnold: It Came From Outer Space (1953)
Steven Spielberg: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Steven Spielberg: E.T. (1982)
Tim Burton: Mars Attacks (1996)

4
The Fermi Paradox
• Given the probability of exoplanets, the probability
of life, the probability of sentient beings, the
probability of high technology, etc, the Earth must
have been visited many times by aliens
• "Where is everybody?" (Enrico Fermi, 1950)
• Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison: "Searching
for Interstellar Communications“ (Nature, 1959)
• First Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
meeting (West Virginia, 1961)
• Frank Drake’s equation (1961): number of
civilizations in our galaxy with which radio-
communication should be possible
Unknown:

5
Life on Earth
• Carbon
• Left-handed
• DNA
• Reproduction
• Metabolism
• Homeostasis (NASA)
A carbon atom has four
electrons that can combine
with other atoms, usually
H, O, N

6
Definition of life
• Richard Dawkins:
– Living beings have to work to keep from
eventually merging into their surroundings
– There is a natural tendency towards merging
seamlessly with the rest of nature.
– We have to work in order to maintain our
identity.
– When we stop working, we die: then we
merge with our surroundings.
– Living beings are never in equilibrium with
their surroundings, unless they are dead

7
Definition of life
• What is life made of?
– All living systems are made of the same
fundamental constituents
– These molecules cannot move and
cannot grow
– Still, when they are combined in
systems, they grow and move.
– New properties emerge.
– The first new property is the ability to
self-assemble
– Eventually we get cells, tissues, organs,
bodies, societies…

8
Definition of life
• Life occurs at three levels:
– Phylogenetic: organisms evolve into other organisms
– Ontogenetic: each organism changes (or grows) from
birth till death
– Epigenetic: the behavior of each organism changes
during its lifetime (the organism “learns”)

9
Definition of life
• Life as information
– Information that survives from
one individual to another
("genotype”)
– Information about the
individual ("phenotype")
– When we say that "ants are
alive" (vs stones) and "I am
alive" (vs someone who is
dead) we mean two different
things

11
Human Life
Embryo’s development
Fish, tortoise, chick, rabbit, human?

12
Life
Embryo’s development

13
Human Life
Which one is the human?

16
A brief history of Genetics
• 1859: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
• 1865: Gregor Mendel’s genes
• 1920s: Population Genetics (probabilities)
• 1940s: Modern Synthesis (variation=mutation)
• 1944: Oswald Avery discovers genes are made of DNA
• 1953: Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double
helix of DNA
• 1961: Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei discover
how the 4-letter genetic code gets translated into the 20-letter
language of proteins
• 1965: Robert Holley discovers transfer RNA

17
Design Without a Designer
DARWIN'S THEORY IS ABOUT SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
DARWIN'S THEORY IS ABOUT DESIGN

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Charles Darwin (1858)
• Evolution=variation+selection
– Variation is ubiquitous
– Natural selection is the driving force of evolution
– New species are created by the action of natural
selection on variation
• Adaptation
– New species are caused by the need to adapt to
environmental changes
• Competition

19
Charles Darwin
• Evolution is the result of inherited
differences that occur between one
generation and the next
• All living beings are the descendants of a
simple primeval form of life
• The diversity of life and extinct species are
explained by evolution

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Bacteria, Archaea, Eucaryota You are here

21
Charles Darwin
• Mystery of variation, that appears to be random
• Variation can only be treated as a statistical quantity and
described statistically
• Populations, not individuals

22
Charles Darwin
• Darwin's theory was three theories in one
– A theory of natural selection (the environment
selects species)
– A theory of heredity (wrong - later replaced by
Mendel's)
– A theory of variation (randomness)

23
Charles Darwin
• Natural selection AND Sexual selection (competition
for survival AND competition for reproduction)
• Sexual selection: males compete for females, females
choose males
• Males were the first artists/musicians, females were the
first art/music critics

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• Designing by trial and error
– The offspring is never an exact copy of the parents
– The environment (e.g., natural selection)
indirectly “selects” which variations (which
individuals) survive
– Nobody programs the changes in the species
– Design emerges spontaneously
– Selection = environment
– Variation = randomness

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– The environment (e.g., natural selection)
indirectly “selects” which variations (which
connections) survive
– Nobody programs the changes in the connections
– Design emerges spontaneously
– Selection = environment
– Variation = randomness

26
– Natural selection has never produced a
clock or even a wheel; but it has produced
eyes and brains
– Humans can produce clocks, but not eyes
or brains
– Very complex design can emerge
spontaneously via an algorithmic process

27
• Gregor Mendel (1865)
– Traits are inherited as units, not as "blends“
– Each trait is represented by a "unit" of transmission,
by a "gene“
– Traits are passed on to the offspring in a completely
random manner: any offspring can have any
combination of the traits of the parents.
– There is a unit of inheritance, later named “gene”

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• Sewall Wright and Ronald Fisher: population
genetics (1920s)
– Darwinism turned into a stochastic theory
– Evolution = a shift in gene frequencies
within a population over time
– Unification of Darwin and Mendel

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• “Modern synthesis“ (1940s)
– The synthetic theory of evolution merged a
theory of inheritance (Mendel’s genetics)
and a theory of species (Darwin’s
evolutionary biology)
+

30
• “Modern synthesis“ (1940s)
– Variation is due to mutation: when copying
genes, nature is prone to making
typographical errors that yield variation in a
population

31
• Oswald Avery (1944) identifies the the substance
that genes are made of, the bearer of genetic
information: the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
• Francis Crick and James Watson (1953) discover
the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule
• Genetic information is encoded in a mathematical
form, the “genetic code”
• DNA is made of four kinds of nucleotides,
proteins are made of twenty types of aminoacids
• Francis Crick (1957) concludes that information
must flow only from the nucleid acids to proteins,
never the other way around.

32
• Sydney Brenner and Francois Jacob (1961)
discover that cells of ribonucleic acid (messenger
RNA) carry the genetic instructions from the
DNA to the ribosomes, the sites within a cell that
manufacture proteins.
• Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod (1961)
discover the mechanism of gene regulation: genes
are organized in a network.
• Marshall Nirenberg and Har Gobind Khorana
(1961) crack the "genetic code“: how the 4-letter
language of DNA is translated into the 20-letter
language of proteins
• Robert Holley discovers transfer RNA (1965),
that mediates the translation of the RNA alphabet
into the protein alphabet

33
• Evolution as pattern theory
– Reproduction. Copies are made of the
pattern.
– Variation. Random errors appear in
the copies and yield variants.
– Selection. The environment selects
which variants survive.
• Each generation copes better with the
environment.
• Other factors may accelerate evolution:
sex, learning, …?

35
Origins
• The birth of the first cell is just statistically impossible
• Graham Cairns-Smith calculated the probability of all
the events required to create a DNA molecule and
concluded that there wasn’t enough matter or time in
the universe to achieve it

36
Origins
• Primordial Soup (Stanley Miller, 1953)
• Panspermia (Svante Arrhenius, 1903 - John Oro, 1961)
• Autocatalytic Loop (Manfred Eigen, 1971)
• Chance (Jacques Monod, 1971)
• Crystals (Graham Cairns-Smith, 1982)
• Thermosynthesis (Anthonie Muller, 1983)
• Surface Metabolism (Gunter Waechtershauser, 1988)
• Necessity (Harold Morowitz, 1992)
• Self-organization (Stuart Kauffman, 1993)
• CHNOPS (Christian DeDuve, 1995)
• Heat bath (Jeremy England, 2013)

37
Origins
1. An organism became capable of generating another
organism of the same type
2. Two organisms engaged in sexual reproduction to
generate an organism of the same type
3. Organisms became complex assemblies of cells
4. Some of those cells developed into specialized
organs
5. A central nervous system developed to direct the
organs
6. Mind and consciousness appeared
7. (Next?)

38
Chemistry of Life
• The “central dogma”

39
Chemistry of Life
• The genetic code
– An organism is a set of cells
– Every cell of an individual contains the
DNA molecule for that individual, or its
"genome“
– Bodies are made of proteins
– A protein is made of aminoacids
– There are 20 kinds of aminoacids

40
Chemistry of Life
– From genes to aminoacids?

41
Chemistry of Life
– A DNA molecule is made of two strings, or
"strands", each one the mirror image of the
other ("double helix")
– Each string is a sequence of "nucleotides" or
"bases", which come in four kinds (adenine,
guanine, cytosine, thymine)
– Nucleotides are the elementary unit of the
"genetic code"
– These four chemical units constitute the
alphabet of the genetic code
– The genetic code: translating the 4-letter
alphabet of DNA into the 20-letter alphabet of
proteins (bases into amino acids)

42
Chemistry of Life
• DNA-RNA-Protein
– The one-dimensional string of instructions of the DNA
is used to determine the three-dimensional shape of a
protein.

43
Chemistry of Life
– DNA is the master blueprint for the production of
proteins and for the replication of itself

44
Chemistry of Life
• Footnote: why a double helix?
– Why double helix?
– “Redundancy is a familiar stratagem to designers of
error-detecting and error-correcting codes. If a portion
of one strand of the DNA helix were damaged, the
information in that portion could be retrieved from the
complementary strand” (Bob Haynes and Phil
Hanawalt, 1967)

45
Chemistry of Life
• mRNA
– 4 nucleotides arranged in trios (codons) each
corresponding to one of the 20 aminoacids

46
Chemistry of Life
• The genome
– The genome is organized into chromosomes (23
pairs in the case of the human race)
– Chromosomes are organized into genes
– A gene is a section of the DNA molecule which
instructs the cell to manufacture proteins
(indirectly, a gene determines a specific trait of the
individual)
– Genes vary in size, from 500 bases long to more
than two million bases

47
Chemistry of Life
• The genome
– Humans have about 20,000 genes, only six
times more than the Escherichia Coli
bacterium
– Chimpanzees share 98.6% of the human
genome
– 98% of the human genome contains the
same DNA found in most other vertebrates
– Our genome has only 20,000 genes, but our
body has 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion)
cells.

48
Chemistry of Life
• Trivia: estimates of human genes over the
years
– 1960s: 2 million genes
– 1999: 100,000
– 2001: 30,000
– 2004: 24,500
– 2007: 20,500
– 2014: 19,000
• While it takes a lot of neurons to create the
complexity of the brain, it takes very few
genes to create the complexity of the body

49
Chemistry of Life
• The genome
– The genome is not a sequential program, that
is executed mechanically one gene after the
other. It is more like a network of genes that
"regulate" each other.
– The genetic "program" behaves more like a
network of switches.

50
Chemistry of Life
• Network of genes
http://www.pnas.org

51
Chemistry of Life
• The genome
– All living organisms use DNA to store
hereditary information and they use the
exact same code (the "genetic" code) to
write such information in DNA
– The smallest genome that is known is the
genome of the Mycoplasma Genitalium:
470 genes
– Highest number of genes: Daphnia Pulex,
31,000 genes
– Longest genomes: Amoeba Dubia (200
times longer than the human genome),
Paris Japonica (50 times)

52
Chemistry of Life
• The genome
– Genotype is the "genetic makeup" of the
organism. The organism itself is the
“phenotype”.
– The phenotype is the physical manifestation of
the genotype (the "body").

53
Chemistry of Life
• The cell
– Cell membrane
– Nucleus: site where DNA is transcribed into RNA
– Ribosome: site where creation of proteins takes place
– Cytoplasm

54
Chemistry of Life
• The cell
– The cell’s cytoskeleton is made of tubulin proteins,
which form cylinders called "microtubules”

55
Chemistry of Life
• The cell

56
Chemistry of Life
• The cell
– "Cell differentiation": each cell
"expresses" only some of the
genes in the genome
– The human body has about
265 different cell types.
– Differentiation regulated by
topology: depending on where
a cell is, it exchanges energy
(which is information) with
some cells rather than others.
– Stem cell = unspecialized cell
The cells of the 3- to 5-day-old
embryo (blastocyst) generate all
the specialized cell types (heart,
lungs, skin, etc)

57
Chemistry of Life
• The matter of life
– Life on Earth is based on the element carbon.
– Carbon can bond with oxygen, hydrogen and
nitrogen because of its four valence electrons
– Both proteins and nucleic acids (DNA, RNA) are
made of carbon
– Energy is stored in the form of carbohydrates

58
Chemistry of Life
• Life on Earth uses carbon-based
molecules and a base-4 genetic code
• Is it possible for a living being from
another planet to be made of
something else and be encoded in a
different kind of code?
• Humans have built robots made mostly
of metal and copper that are capable of
reproducing, growing, communicating,
exploring Mars, driving on the
highway…

60
Theories of Evolution
• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (hereditarity of acquired
characters, 1809)
• Charles Darwin (differential rate of reproduction,
1858)
• Samuel Butler (life’s free will, 1879)
• James-Mark Baldwin (Baldwin effect, 1896)
• Lev Berg (directed mass mutation, 1922)

61
• Stephen Jay Gould (punctuated equilibrium, 1972)
• Stuart Kauffman (order succeeds despite natural
selection, 1993)
• Michael Behe (irreducible complexity, 1996)

62
• Why we have sex
– Sex increases variation and therefore the chances
of surviving changes in the environment (August
Weismann, 1889)
– Basically, sex accounts for faster rates of
adaptation
– Sex is a trade-off: a genome sacrifices a part of its
genes to team up with another genome and
increase its chances of survival in the
environment
– Lynn Margulis: once upon a time "eating and
mating were the same"

63
• Why we have to die
– A stable immutable form of life would have scant
chances of surviving the continuous changes in the
environment
– A form of life that continuously reshapes itself has a
chance to “evolve” with the environment
– Lynn Margulis: "death was the first sexually-
transmitted disease“

64
Identity
• There are ~100 trillion cells in your body (of
which 100 billion neurons)
• Cells reproduce by dividing - they produce
clones of themselves (mitosis)
• Cellular longevity cap: the "Hayflick limit“: human
cells can only double ~50 times before they stop
reproducing (Leonard Hayflick & Paul
Moorhead, 1961)
• Yes, the Hayflick limit keep us from living forever

65
Identity
• Programmed cell death (apoptosis) is a
clockwork process of replacement of cells for
the good of the organism (John Kerr, Alastair
Currie & Andrew Wyllie, 1972)
• Apoptosis is the main deterrent against cancer
(“immortality” of cells would increase the
chances of cancer)

66
Identity
• The intelligence of the body: It builds itself
from 1 cell into 100 trillion cells in 9 months,
and it rebuilds 98% of itself in less than a
year
• Your body is younger than you think: the
average age of all the cells in an adult's body
is 7 to 10 years (Jonas Frisen, 2005)
• Every year about 98% of the atoms in your
body are replaced

67
Identity
• You are physically someone else…
• Good news: neurons in the cerebral cortex are not
replaced - your neurons are the oldest cells in
your body
• Bad news: many neurons die and are never
replaced, hence you have fewer neurons than
when you were a child.

68
Identity
• There are 10 times more bacterial cells in your
body than human cells (bacteria are far smaller
than human cells) - 500 species in the intestine
alone (Human Microbiome Project, 2012)
• Where they came from: your mother's uterus, your
mother’s milk, natural water, food, air…
• What they do: help your immune systems and
your digestion (“commensal bacteria”)
• “Human bodies are an assemblage of life-forms
living together” (David Relman, Stanford, 2012)

70
Break
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh"
(Voltaire)

71
Physics of Life
• Second law of Thermodynamics
– Entropy: a measure of disorder
– Disorder must always increase. Physical
systems decay.
• But…
– Life creates order: biological systems appear
from nowhere, organize themselves, grow,
reproduce
• Two arrows of time:
– Physical systems decay
– Biological systems grow and evolve

72
Physics of Life
• Negentropy (Erwin Schrodinger, 1944)
– Living systems exist in a flux of energy
– The existence of a living organism
depends on increasing the entropy of
the rest of the universe.

73
Physics of Life
• Non-equilibrium dissipative systems (Ilya
Prigogine, 1960s)
– “Dissipative structures” have the capacity for
self-organization
– They maintain their structure by continuously
dissipating energy
– Dissipative structures reside permanently in
states of non-equilibrium, unlike inanimate
matter
– The flow of matter and energy “through” the
body of the living organisms is what makes it
possible for the organism to maintain a
(relatively) stable form
– Equilibrium is death, non-equilibrium is life

74
Physics of Life
• Non-equilibrium dissipative systems (Ilya Prigogine,
1960s)
– In order to stay alive, they have to be always in
this state far from equilibrium.
– An organism "lives" because it absorbs energy
from the external world and processes it to
generate an internal state of lower entropy.
– An organism "lives" as long as it can avoid falling
in the equilibrium state (maximum entropy)
– Equilibrium is death, non-equilibrium is life.

75
Physics of Life
• Non-equilibrium dissipative systems
Information dynamics

76
Physics of Life
• Daniel Brooks and Edward Wiley (1988)
– “Dollo's law” states the irreversibility of
biological evolution: evolution never
repeats itself
– Dollo's law is the biological manifestation
of the second law of Thermodynamics

77
Physics of Life
• Eric Schneider (1992)
– A system pushed away from its attractor
by a gradient, will tend to return to the
attractor
– The stronger the push, the stronger the
reaction, the reaction being some form of
self-organization
– When the gradient pushing the system is
particularly strong, the system may self-
organize in ever more complex structures
– “Nature abhors a gradient”

78
Physics of Life
• Alfred Lotka (1920s)
– Ecosystems are networks of energy flows
• Eugene Odum (1953)
– The entire Earth is a set of interconnected
ecosystems
• Harold Morowitz (1968)
– Flows of energy organize systems
• Jeffrey Wicken (1987)
– “Thermodynamics is above all the science
of spontaneous processes”

79
Physics of Life
• Bio-information theories
– Ecosystem = cybernetic system (Ramon
Margalef, 1968)
– Life = a combination of metabolism and
information control (Tibor Ganti, 1971)
– Life = pattern (Gregory Bateson, 1979)
– In living systems the manipulation of
information prevails over the manipulation of
energy (Chris Langton, 1989)
– Biosystem = information processor (Lionel
Johnson, 1998)

80
Physics of Life
• David Layzer (1968)
– In an expanding universe the potential entropy
increases faster than energy and matter can
“use”, making room for the growth of order

81
Physics of Life
• Ronald Fox (1988)
– The interaction between organism and
environment as well as the interaction among
organisms are nonlinear in nature
– The nervous system is not only capable of
predicting the outcome of linear situations, but
also of predicting the much more important
outcome of nonlinear situations
– The reason is that the nervous system allows the
organism to rapidly simulate the outcome of
nonlinear events

82
Summary
• From Bioenergetics to the Brain
– Life is about flows of energy
– Thermodynamics is the discipline that studies energy
– Life requires a new kind of Thermodynamics: non-
equilibrium Thermodynamics
– Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics has to do with non-
linear systems
– Survival requires the ability to predict what will happen
to the system
– If the system is non-linear, no mathematical prediction
is possible: the only way to predict is to simulate the
system at a higher speed
– The brain is a simulation machine of nonlinear systems

84
Origin of Form
• Morphogenesis
– During development, cells split and split
and split
– Every time a cell splits, the new cells
inherit (almost) exactly the same genes
– But then some cells become blood cells
and some cells become bone cells and
some cells become …
– If they run the same program, how come
that two cells become two different things?
– And how do they know the position where
those two things have to be?

85
Origin of Form
• Morphogenesis
– Zebras have black and white stripes: how
do those cells know that they have to be
white or black?
– A body is shaped by the orderly movement
of billions of cells to the locations that
specify their role

86
Origin of Form
• Morphogenesis
– What determines which genes are switched
on and off in a given cell?
– How do "regulatory" genes know that a cell
has to become part of a hair rather than a
liver?

87
Origin of Form
• Vitalism
– Paul Weiss (1939) and Hans Speman
(1938): "organizing fields" help organisms
take their shape
– Conrad Waddington (1957): "chreodes“ (a
mathematical formalization of organizing
fields) and the "epigenetic landscape“
– Ralph Abraham (1976): "macrons“
(collective vibrational patterns) are
ubiquitous in nature (in solids, liquids,
gases)
– Paul Davies (1999): the “life force” is a
kind of software program (information is
traded by “informational” forces the same
way that matter is traded by physical
forces)

88
Origin of Form
• Vitalism
– Donald Ingber (1993)
• “Tensegrity" structures share the property
of optimizing structural stability
• Living systems, at all hierarchical levels,
stabilize through the interplay of two forces,
one which is tensional and one which is
compressive
• Buckminster Fuller ‘s geodesic dome: the
geometry of the components constrains the
Physics of the components, thereby
immobilizing the whole structure
• Tensegrity structures abound in nature,
from the cytoskeleton to carbon atoms

89
Origin of Form
• Vitalism
– Susan Oyama (1985)
• The form of an organism cannot be
transmitted in genes or contained in the
environment
• Form is the result of interactive
construction, not the outcome of a
preexisting plan
• An organism inherits its environment, as
much as it inherits its genotype
• It inherits some competence, but also the
stimuli that make that competence
significant

91
Bibliography
• Crick, Francis: Astonishing Hypothesis (Macmillan, 1993)
• Dawkins, Richard: The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, 1987)
• Deduve, Christian: Vital Dust (Basic, 1995)
• Dennett, Daniel: Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
• Deutsch David: The Beginning Of Infinity (Viking, 2011)
• Dyson, Freeman: Infinite In All Directions (Harper & Row, 1988)
• Fisher, Ronald Aylmer: The Genetical Theory Of Natural Selection (Dover,
1929)
• Fox Ronald: Energy And The Evolution Of Life (Freeman, 1988)
• Gould, Stephen Jay: Ever Since Darwin (Deutsch, 1978)
• Kauffman, Stuart: The Origins Of Order (Oxford University Press, 1993)
• Mayr, Ernst: Animal Species And Evolution (Harvard Univ Press, 1963)
• Morowitz, Harold: Energy Flow In Biology (Academic Press, 1968)
• Morowitz, Harold: Entropy And The Magic Flute (Oxford University Press,
1993)
• Weber, Bruce, Depew David & Smith James: Entropy, Information And
Evolution (Mit Press, 1988)

92
Ecological Realism: The Embodied Mind
"Life is what happens to us
while we are making other plans"
(Allen Saunders, 1957)

93
• Is a transcendental disembodied mind
possible?
• The brain is in the body, and the body is in the
world
• Life is a continuously changing equilibrium
between an organism and its environment
• The brain is one of the many organs that help
an organism survive in the environment
• “Cognition” is about the interaction between
organisms and their environment

94
• Minsky and Searle: “Brains cause minds. Mind
is what happens to brains.”
• How about: “Bodies cause minds. Mind is what
happens to (some) bodies?”

95
• Empiricism: All knowledge comes from experience
(e.g., 20th century behaviorists)
• Plato: All knowledge comes from reasoning
• Kant: Perception is shaped by innate knowledge
(space, time, cause/effect, etc)
• Helmholtz: Perception is a mere hypothesis on what
the world is
• Ecological realism: our senses, shaped by natural
evolution, don't tell us what the world is really like
but simply what needs to be known for surviving
and reproducing
• Perception is an active process

96
• The mind operates in a world that is the
outcome of the body’s experience
• Jakob von Uexküll (1934)
– The “umwelt” of a species is the set of all
possible stimuli from the environment
that the species can perceive plus all
possible actions that the species can
perform in the environment.
– A species’ reality is confined in its
umwelt
– Each species grasps reality differently
because it lives inside a different umwelt.

97
The Information Flow
• James Jerome Gibson (1966): Cognition
– Cognition “is” the interaction between living beings
and the environment
– The process of perceiving is a process of picking up
information that is available in the environment
– Information originates from the interaction between
the organism and its environment
– Information = continuous energy flow of the
environment
– Cognition is the information flow

98
• James Jerome Gibson: Action and perception
– Cognitive life is passive, not active: the organism
is free to move in the world, but it is the
environment that feeds it information
– The way this information is "processed" is direct:
there is no mediation by the mind
– The sensory data coming from the environment
already contain all the relationships needed to
navigate the environment.
– Action follows perception, and the two can be
viewed as dual aspects of the same process.

99
• James Jerome Gibson: information patterns
– What the brain truly does is recognize the
information that matters.
– The information that matters is patterns: any
pattern of environmental stimuli that repeats
itself over time constitutes "information".
– Our brain is an organ capable of discovering
"invariants" in the environment

100
• James Jerome Gibson: Perception
– Detecting the invariants of the environment
– A continuously ongoing process
– The function of the brain is to orient the
organs of perception for seeking information
– There is much more information in the world
and less in the head
– The environment does most of the work that
we traditionally ascribe to the mind

101
• Ulric Neisser (1975): Cognition
– Cognition is the skill of dealing with
knowledge that comes from the environment
– The mind developed to cope with that
knowledge
– Directionality of exploration by the organism:
the organism is not completely passive in the
hands of the environment, but somehow it
has a cognitive apparatus that directs its
search for information

102
• Ulric Neisser: Cognition
– The brain “knows” in advance which
objects are more likely to be “seen” in a
certain situation
– "We can see only what we know how to
look for"
– Schemas express the direct relation
between action and perception
– A schema is a blueprint for what
information the organism presumes to
encounter and what it entails in the
environment

103
• Ulric Neisser: Perception
– Perception/cognition transforms the
perceiver: an organism "is" the cognitive
acts it engages in

104
Philosophical Variants
• Fred Dretske (1981)
– Information is in the environment and
cognitive agents simply absorb it, thereby
creating mental states
• Daniel Dennett
– The organism continuously reflects its
environment
– The organization of its system implicitly
contains a representation of the
environment

105
Impact of Ecological Realism
• Reversal of the traditional role between
the organism and the environment: the
organism not as an actor but as a
“reactor”
• Generalization of the concept of
cognitive system: any living being can
be considered, to some extent, a
cognitive system
• A living organism is a part of the world
capable of perception and action

106
Situated Cognition
• Rodney Brooks (1986)
– Robot = situated agent
– Interaction between an agent and its
environment.
– Situated agents have no knowledge (unlike
expert systems)
– The world contains all the information that the
organism needs, therefore there is no need
to represent it in the mind
– The environment acts like a memory external
to the organism, from which the organism
can retrieve any kind of information through
perception

107
Situated Cognition
• Rodney Brooks
Traditional
architecture
Brooks

108
Situated Cognition
• Rodney Brooks
– Behavior is determined by the structure of the
environment
• The system decomposes in layers of goal-
driven behavior
• The system incrementally composes its
behavior through the interaction with the world
– No difference between perception, reasoning and
action
– The environment is the center of action, not the
mind
– The environment is action, continuous action
– Cognition is rational kinematics

109
Situated Cognition
• Rodney Brooks
Baxter (2012)
(1986)

110
Situated Cognition
• Valentino Breitenberg (1984)
– Vehicles: simple electro-mechanical components
– At the beginning, there are only “vehicles” that
respond to their environment.
– As their circuitry increases, the vehicles seem to
exhibit more sophisticated feelings.
– Depending on the wiring Vehicle #2 is either
"aggressive“ or "afraid".
– These vehicles seem to acquire not only new skills,
but also a stronger personality.
– It is far easier to create machines that exhibit
"cognitive" behavior than it is to analyse their
behavior and try to deduce the internal structure that
produces such behavior

111
Situated Cognition
• Andy Clark (1997)
– We can dispose of the body and still find ways that a
brain would calculate how to perform actions
– But the very reason that we have bodies is that bodies
make it a lot easier to perform those actions even
without calculating every single movement
– The fact that a body's movements are constrained by
the body's structure is actually an advantage: once the
brain directs a general action, there are only so many
ways that the action can be carried out by the body.
– There is no need to calculate ways that are beyond the
capabilities of the body.

113
Autopoiesis
• Humberto Maturana (1970)
– The frog sees patterns of small moving shadows and ,
by reacting to those patterns, catches insects, its food
stuff (1959)
– "Autopoiesis" is the process by which an organism can
continuously reorganize its own structure
– Adaptation consists in regenerating the organism's
structure so that its relationship to the environment
remains constant
– Living systems are units of interaction
– They cannot be understood independently of their
environment
– The relationship with the environment molds the
configuration of a cognitive system

114
Autopoiesis
• Humberto Maturana
– Living systems are organized in closed loops
– Goal: maintaining the circular organization of the
whole.
– A cell exhibits autopoiesis, as does the Earth as a
whole.
– Autopoiesis is self-maintenace
– The product of a living system is a new organization of
itself
– A living system continually produces itself
– Organisms use energy (mainly from light) and matter
(water, carbon, nitrogen, etc) to continuously remake
themselves

115
Autopoiesis
– The circular organization of living organisms
constitutes a homeostatic system whose function is to
maintain this very same circular organization.
– This circular organization helps maintain the organism's
identity through its interactions with the environment
– Cognition is biological in the sense that the
cognitive domain of an organism is defined by its
interactions with the environment.
– Cognition is the way in which an autopoietic system
interacts with the environment (i.e., reorganizes itself)

116
Autopoiesis
– All living systems are cognitive systems
– Action and cognition cannot be separated (”All doing is
knowing and all knowing is doing")
– Communication is not about transmission of
information but rather coordination of behavior among
living systems.

117
Autopoiesis
• Francisco Varela (1979)
– The human body is a collection of both matter
and experience, both a biological entity and a
phenomenological entity
– Cognition is embodied action (or "enaction")
– The world reflects the actions in which we
engage, i.e. it is "enacted" from our actions
– Organisms and environment mutually specify
each other
– Organisms drift naturally in the environment.
– Evolution is not optimal adaptation but "natural
drift"

118
Autopoiesis
• Francisco Varela (1999)
– “The mind is not in the head"
– “The mind is in this non-place of the co-
determination of inner and outer, so one cannot
say that is outside or inside“
– Mind is "a coherent whole which is nowhere to
be found“
– "The mind neither exists nor does it not exist “
– My mind is a "selfless self“

119
Hyper-autopoiesis
• The biosphere as a whole is autopoietic as it
maintains itself through a careful balance of
elements
• Lynn Margulis: life "is" the surface of the Earth
• Vladimir Vernadsky (1926): living matter is the
most powerful of geological forces
• James Lovelock views the entire surface of the
Earth, including "inanimate" matter, as a living
being (which he named "Gaia").
• Vernadsky: the Earth is developing its own mind,
the "noosphere

121
The Extended Phenotype
• Richard Dawkins (1982)

122
– The "extended phenotype" includes the
world that an organism interacts with
– The organism alone does not have biological
relevance
– What makes sense is an open system made
of the organism and its neighbors
– The very genome of a species can be
viewed as a representation of the
environment inside every single cell

123
– The control of an organism is never
complete inside and null outside: there is a
continuum of degrees of control, which
allows partiality of control inside (e.g.,
parasites operate on the nervous system
of their hosts) and an extension of control
outside (as in the spiderweb)

124
• Ruth Millikan (1987)
– The "system" must include more than just
the organism, something that extends
beyond its skin
– The immune system can only operate if it is
attacked by viruses
– Tools are an extension of the organism

125
• Richard Lewontin (1981)
– Organisms construct environments that are
the conditions for their own further evolution
and for the evolutions of nature towards new
environments
– Organism and environment mutually specify
each other
– An organism is both the subject and the
object of its evolution

126
Sensory Exotica
Some animals have other senses
– The bat can avoid objects in absolute
darkness at impressive speeds and even
capture flying insects
– Dolphins generate their sonar calls also
through their nose, besides their larynx
– Migratory animals (birds, salmons,
whales…) can orient themselves and
navigate vast territories without any help
from maps
– Butterflies take more than a generation to
complete the journey, i.e. those who begin
the journey are not the ones that reach the
destination

127
Sensory Exotica
Some animals have other senses
– Birds are equipped with a sixth sense for
the Earth's magnetic field
– Bees know where the Sun is even when
they cannot see it because their eyes can
see ultraviolet sunlight
– Many animals can camouflage
– Some fish emit electrical current
– Cephalopods can even change body shape

128
Sensory Exotica
The Farside

130
Break
"Nature has all the answers, so what is your question?"
(Howard Odum)

131
Altruism
"Hell is other people"
(Sartre)

132
Altruism
• The Veneer Theory of human morality:
morality is just a thin veneer over a cauldron
of selfish brutal instincts
• Darwin’s theory of evolution (“survival of the
fittest”) is ultimately about competition for
scarce natural resources
Competition belongs to a powerful thread of
Western thought (Adam Smith, capitalism)
Cooperation belongs to a very minor thread of
Western thought
Cooperation more likely to emerge out of
communist and Eastern philosophical
backgrounds

133
Altruism
• Petr Kropotkin (1902)
– Animals must be social and moral
– Not an individual struggle for survival, but
struggle for survival by masses of individuals,
a struggle not against each other but a
collective struggle against the common
enemy, i.e. the environment
– Cooperation is more important than
competition

134
Altruism
• Kinji Imanishi (1941)
– Darwin was wrong
– Cooperation is more important than
competition in nature
– Individuals form societies and cannot exist
outside societies because it is through
societies that they can solve the needs
required to their survival

135
Altruism
• George Williams (1966)
– An individual's chances of survival are
increased by having friends and
decreased by having enemies
– Evolution has endowed individuals with
"altruistic" instincts and emotions because
it helps them survive

136
Altruism
• John Maynard-Smith (1973)
– Game theory proves that individuals
cooperate not because they share genes
but because cooperation is the best
strategy

137
Altruism
• John Maynard-Smith & Eors Szathmary (1993)
– Each major transition in evolution affected
biological units that were capable of independent
replication, and each transition turned them into
biological units that needed other biological units in
order to replicate
• Independently replicating nucleid acids evolved
into chromosomes (assemblies of molecules that
must replicate together)
• Sexless life was replaced by species that have
male and female members, and that can replicate
only if a male and a female “cooperate”
• Ants and bees can only replicate in colonies
– Each “major transition” seems to produce
cooperation

138
Altruism
– In each major transition, sets of identical biological
units were replaced by sets of specialized units that
needed to cooperate in order to survive and replicate
– A world of multifunctional self-sufficient biological
entities evolved into a society of specialized entities
– The multifunctional cell led to cellular organization
and eventually to bodies with specialized limbs and
organs that eventually led to societies of specialists
(ants, bees, humans)

139
Altruism
– Division of labor among a group of specialists is
more effective than a multifunctional non-specialist
but only if the specialists cooperate
– Altruism, or at least division of labor and
cooperation, appeared very early in the history of
life, as soon as molecules were enclosed within
membranes.

140
Altruism
– Cooperation is inherent in Mendel’s laws: a gene’s
chances of surviving in future generations depends
on the success of the cell that hosts that gene, a
success that depends on the success of all the other
genes that determine the life of that cell
– Hence a gene has a vested interest in “cooperating”
with the other genes.
– The cell would not survive if its genes did not form
an efficient society.

141
Altruism
• Kin selectionism
– John Haldane (1955)
• Altruism is proportional to genetic proximity
• The genetic self-interest of the individual
peaks in its own body, but it extends to all of
its kin, proportional to how genetically close
they are
• It is not the survival of the individual that
matters: it is survival of as many genes as
possible
• The individual is programmed to preserve
not only itself but also other individuals that
share a similar genetic repertory, in a
manner proportional to that similarity.

142
Altruism
• Group selectionism
– Vero-Copner Wynne-Edwards (1962)
• It is groups (rather than single individuals)
that adapt to the environment
– David Sloan Wilson (1975)
• Groups often behave like organisms
• An organism can be viewed as a collection
of genes that work together towards
maximizing their common chances of
survival
• "Selfishness beats altruism within groups.
Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.”

143
Altruism
• Group selectionism
– Robert Trivers (1971)
• Individuals can benefit in the long term by
trusting each other
– Frans de Waal (1996)
• Communities yield benefits to the
individual, and that is the biological reason
the individual will try to promote the
community
– Robert Axelrod’s “Tit for Tat” (1981)

144
Altruism
• Matt Ridley (1993)
– Co-evolution with parasites
– Evolution is accelerated even by apparent
enemies like parasites
– Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in
order to cope with invasions of parasites:
parasites have a harder time adapting to the
diversity generated by sexual reproduction,
whereas they would have devastating effects if
all individuals of a species were identical (if the
children were as vulnerable to the same
diseases as the parents)
– Plants reproduce with the help of insects
– The need to fight competition often leads to
cooperation

145
Summary
• The emphasis in evolutionary theories has traditionally
been on competition, not cooperation, although it is
through cooperation, not competition, that considerable
jumps in behavior can be attained.
• In a sense, living beings, and humans in particular,
have mastered altruism the same way they mastered
tools that allowed them to extend their cognitive
abilities
• Humans are able to deal with large groups of non-
relatives
• De facto, those individuals are “used” as a tool to
augment the mind: instead of having to solve problems
alone, the mind can use an entire group.

147
Theory of Mind
• David Premack and Guy Woodruff (1978)
– Children are prewired with the distinction between
"minds" and non-minds, i.e. between sentient beings
and inanimate matter.
– Children treat differently objects that move by
themselves and objects that move only when someone
moves them.
– Children tend to see a "motive" behind self-propelled
objects.
– It is a built-in ability to guess the state of mind of
another being.
– Face perception might be the most developed visual
skill in humans.

148
Theory of Mind
• We can't help building theories of mind whenever we look
at somebody

149
Theory of Mind
• Empathy and Mirror Neurons
– Laughter is contagious. Panic is contagious too.
– Each mind contains a theory of other minds
– This "theory of mind" is a physical representation
inside my brain of the neural state of somebody else's
brain.
– This explains the empathy: I feel your joy or your pain
because my brian physically "duplicates" that brainstate
and therefore makes me feel what you are feeling.
– "Mirror neurons“ (Giacomo Rizzolatti, 1996) may
explain altruism: the most powerful motivation to help
someone in trouble is that I can feel their pain and the
only way to stop feeling it is to help them get out of
trouble. Then I will feel their joy.

150
Theory of Mind
• We can't help building theories of mind whenever we look
at somebody

152
Endosymbiosis
• Structural coupling: organisms are composites
– Structural coupling creates more and more
complex organisms
– Humberto Maturana: "autopoiesis” is a process
to generate progressively more and more
complex organisms
– Ben Goertzel (1993): organisms capable of
effectively coupling with other organisms are
more likely to survive
– Darwinian evolution can occur much faster and
can exhibit sudden jumps to higher forms

153
Endosymbiosis
• Konstantin Merezhkovsky (1909):
symbiogenesis
– One fateful day a mycoid managed to
become the nucleus of an ameboid rather
than its meal
• Ivan Wallin (1927): endosymbiosis
– Bacteria may represent the fundamental
cause of the "origin of species"

154
Endosymbiosis
• Lynn Margulis (1966):
– Mitochondria (that generate the energy
required for metabolism in humans) look like
bacteria
– Mitochondria have their own DNA, separate
from the DNA of the cell
– Chloroplasts (that carry out photosynthesis in
plant cells) look like bacteria
– Bacteria can trade genes
– Bacteria can reproduce at amazing rates
– Endosymbiosis of bacteria is responsible for
the creation of complex forms of life
– Our multicellular bodies are amalgams of
several different strains of bacteria

155
Endosymbiosis
• Endosymbiosis
Eukaryotic cell

156
Endosymbiosis
• A world of bacteria
– Life can be viewed as a plan for bacteria to
exist forever
– The biosphere is controlled mostly by bacteria
– The biosphere is "their" environment, not ours
– Even the geology of our planet is due to the
work of bacteria (shaped by the work of
bacteria over million of years)
– We are allowed to live in it, thanks to the work
of bacteria, which maintain the proper balance
of chemicals in the air

157
Endosymbiosis
• A world of bacteria
– More than 90% of the cells that make up the
human body are not human: they are bacteria
– Commensal bacteria are vitally important for
our survival
– There are more than 1000 species of bacteria
in the human digestive system alone (and
many more in the respiratory system, in the
urogenital tract, on the skin, etc)
– We are a superorganism, or, at least, a walking
and thinking ecosystem

158
Endosymbiosis
• Luis Villarreal (2004)
– A virus is a parasite that comes alive, and
replicates, only while it feeds on host cells
– The genetic instructions of the virus induce
the host cell to manufacture the genes that
the virus needs in order to assemble a copy of
itself
– Their fast replication continuously creates
new genes, and that process of gene
manufacturing takes place inside another
organism
– Some of those might get “transferred”
permanently to the infected organism
– Evolution by viral infection

160
Superbeings
• Collective beings
– Single-celled bacteria form large colonies in
countless ecosystems, particularly visible in
seaside locations.
– Soil amoebae join together in one huge
organism that can react quickly to light and
temperature to find food supplies.
– Sponges are actually collections of single-celled
organisms held together by skeletons of
minerals
– Ants and bees show that the difference between
a multi-cellular organism and a society of
organisms resides only in the type of internal
communication

161
Superbeings
– Karl Von Frisch (1967)
• The individual is an oxymoron: a bee
cannot exist without the rest of the colony
• The colony, on the other hand,
constitutes a complex and precise self-
regulating system
• The hive exhibits a personality, the
individual is totally anonymous

162
Superbeings
– Lewis Thomas (1974)
• "I have been trying to think of the earth
as a single organism, but…I cannot think
of it this way. It is too big, too complex,
with too many working parts….it is most
like a single cell.“

163
Superbeings
• Guy Murchie (1978)
– The entire Earth is an organism which uses
as food the heat of the sun, breathes,
metabolizes
– The Earth’s cognition is made of many tiny
parts (organisms) that communicate,
exchange energy, interact
– All living organisms, along with all the
minerals on the surface of the Earth, compose
one giant integrated system that, as a whole,
controls its behavior so as to survive
– And so do galaxies
– Everything constitutes a living superbeing
– The question is not whether there is life
outside our planet, but whether it is possible
to have "non-life"

164
Superbeings
• James Lovelock (1979): Gaia
– The entire surface of the Earth, including
"inanimate" matter, is a living being
– There is a gigantic cycle that involves the
actions and structure of all matter and
eventually yields "life" on this planet
– The environment (volcanoes, rocks, sea
water, sun, rain) is part of life
– At the same time life creates the environment
that it needs
– Life creates the conditions for its own
existence.

165
Superbeings
• Fritjof Capra (1996): the entire planet is a self-
organizing network
• Deborah Gordon (1999): ants organize
themselves like an organism

166
Superbeings
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1925)
• Vladimir Vernadsk (1926)
– "Noosphere“: the Earth is developing its
own mind, the "noosphere", the
aggregation of the cognitive activity of all
its living matter.

168
Gene Selectionism
– The gene is the fundamental unit of evolution:
genes drive evolution and genes drive behavior
– Genes want to live forever
– A "replicator" is an entity that copies itself
– A "vehicle" is the organism that carries the
replicator
– A replicator is preserved over time and spread over
space

169
Gene Selectionism
– Vehicles are merely “tests” of how good that
information is
– Vehicles are the machines that replicators use to
build copies of themselves
– Bodies will disappear
– Genes have a chance to survive forever
– What survives is not my body but my genes
– The mind itself is engineered to perpetuate DNA

170
Gene Selectionism
– In order to maximize its chances of survival, a
gene would cause one of its bodies (one of the
bodies that contain that gene) to help its "kin"
(bodies with the same gene)
– The macroscopic effect would be cooperation
among organisms, while at the microscopic level
that cooperation is truly an attempt by the gene to
outsmart other genes, i.e. it is competition of the
most cynical kind

171
Gene Selectionism
• Helena Cronin (1992)
– "I" am not the subject, i am the object

172
Gene Selectionism
• Matt Ridley (1994)
– Sex provides a way for a gene to participate
in a lottery a number of times: each body is a
participant in the lottery of survival.
– The more bodies, the more chances to win
the lottery.
– Winning this lottery entails some work:
creating and maintaining the organism
– This work must be done jointly with other
genes
– Sex is the process by which a gene is chosen
to work in a body together with other genes

173
Gene Selectionism
• I am but a product of my genes
• Genes represent a higher force than my will, a force
that has been acting for millions of years
• Genes tell me what to will
• Genes tell me how to interact with other people and
with the environment

174
Gene Selectionism
• What a gene would say if teaching altruism
– If you are a gene, you have no problem
sacrificing some of your bodies to save some
others
– Your ultimate goal is to survive (you are the
gene) and you can use any of those bodies
as vehicles to continue your journey through
time.

176
Sociobiology
• Edward Wilson (1975)
– The biological basis of social behavior
– Culturgenes
– All aspects of human culture and behavior are
coded in the genes and have been molded by
natural selection
– Culture is not unique to humans
– A culture expresses itself through its "culturgens“,
the cultural equivalent of genes
– These are the basic units of inheritance in cultural
evolution
– Culturgens assemble the mind of an individual

177
Evolutionary Psychology
Prehistory of Evolutionary Psychology
• William Hamilton (1963): The Genetic Evolution of
Social Behavior
• Angus Bateman (1948): natural selection has
determined different male and female behaviors.
• George Williams (1966): the "sacrifice" required for
reproduction is different for the female and the
male
• Robert Trivers (1972): the investment required for
reproduction (to increase the chances of survival of
the offspring) is different between a male and a
female, and that accounts for different attitudes
towards the other sex and the offspring itself

178
• Robert Wright
– Freud's subconscious replaced with Darwin's natural
selection as the engine of all adult behavior
– Morality is simply the set of rules that increase the
odds to pass one's genes to the next generation

179
• Geoffrey Miller (2000)
– The human mind is not a problem solver, but as a
"sexual ornament".
– The human brain's creative intelligence is too much if
the only purpose is survival
– Survival in the environment does not quite require the
sophistication of Einstein's science or Michelangelo's
paintings or Beethoven's symphonies
– But these are precisely the kind of things that the
human brain does a lot better than other animal brains.
– The human brain is much more powerful than it needs
to be.

180
– Sexual selection is not driven by random
environmental events but by a deliberate strategy to
improve the "genetic quality of the offspring".
– Sexual selection is as intelligent as we are, whereas
natural selection is hardly intelligent at all
– Sexual selection is a form of positive feedback, the
kind of process that can explain the explosive
growth of the human brain.

181
– A fundamental function of the human mind is to display
one's fitness to the other sex
– Painting, singing and dancing are good indicator of
physical and mental fitness, that women recognize,
evaluate and reward with sex.
– Males need to advertise their genes, and this need drives
innovation.
– Artistic activities developed because they contributed to
sexual selection.

182
– Darwin: men compete for women, and women choose men
– Ronald Fisher : Evolution favors both pickier females and
more attractive males
– Sexual selection is a form of positive feedback, the kind of
process that can explain the explosive growth of the human
brain.

184
Memes
• Gregory Bateson (1972)
– The mind is an aggregate of ideas.
– Ideas populate the mind and continuously evolve.
Ideas evolve in a Darwinian fashion, the most
useful ones surviving while useless ones decay and
die away.
– The mind is the theater of a natural selection and
evolution of ideas.
– Our conscious life “is” that evolutionary process.

185
Memes
– Meme: the cultural counterpart of the gene
– A meme is the unit of cultural evolution, just like a
gene is the unit of biological evolution
– Ideas exhibit variation (copying with mistakes) and
selection (pruning the ineffective ones)
– A meme is an idea that reproduces itself like a
parasite
– When a meme enters a mind, it parasitically alters
the mind's process so that a new goal of the mind is
to propagate the meme to other minds

186
Memes
– Just like genes use bodies as vehicles to spread, so
memes use minds as vehicles to spread
– Memes form an ecosphere of ideas.
– The mind is a machine for copying memes, just like
the body is a machine to copy genes

187
Memes
• Daniel Dennett (1995)
– Memes (culture) have created the mind, not the
other way around
– Just like it is genes that drive evolution, it is memes
that drive thought

188
Memes
• Susan Blackmore (1999)
– Each mind is but a meme machine
– A "memeplex" is a group of memes that band
together for some mutual advantage.
– The memeplex as a whole becomes stronger and
stronger and each participating meme benefits.
– Religions and ideologies are memeplexes.
– Minds are invaded by memes all the time
– We can never stop thinking.
– We do not think, we are thought by the memes that
invade us.

189
Memes
• Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (1985)
– The single most important difference between
humans and other species is the ability of
transmitting culture
– Cultural evolution happens at a much faster pace
than genetic evolution

190
Memes
• William Durham (1991)
– Human behavior is due to two main information
systems, one genetic and one cultural
– Both the genetic system and culture are information
systems that instruct phenotypes
– Cultural evolution exhibits a unique property: self-
selection
– The cultural system can influence the direction and
rate of its own evolution: memes influence human
decisions that influence memes.
– The cultural fitness of an “allomeme” (a variant of a
meme) depends on the meme itself

191
Memes
• The body is attacked all the time by viruses
• The body is defended by an immune system
• Strong immune systems repel most viruses
• The mind is attacked all the time by memes
(mind viruses)
• Is there an immune system for the mind that
defends the mind from mind viruses?
• Are there stronger “mind immune systems” that
protect the mind from memes such as religions,
ideologies, pop music, Hollywood movies, …

193
Bibliography
• Dawkins, Richard: The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, 1987)
• Dennett, Daniel: Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
• Gibson, James Jerome: The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception
(Houghton Mifflin, 1979)
• Margulis Lynn: What Is Life? (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
• Maturana, Humberto & Varela Francisco: The Tree Of Knowledge
(Shambhala, 1992)
• Miller, Geoffrey: The Mating Mind (Doubleday, 2000)
• Neisser, Ulric: Cognition And Reality (Freeman, 1975)
• Ridley Mark: The Cooperative Gene (Free Press, 2001)
• Ridley Matt: Evolution (Blackwell, 1993)
• Shlain Leonard: Sex, Time, And Power (Penguin, 2003)
• Varela, Francisco, Thompson Evan & Rosch Eleanor: The Embodied Mind
(Mit Press, 1991)
• Wilson, Edward Osborne: Sociobiology (Belknap, 1975)
• Wright, Robert: The Moral Animal (Random House, 1994)

194
Piero Scaruffi
www.scaruffi.com

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