In february 2009 it will have been 200 years ago Charles Darwin was born. In NRC – a Dutch Daily – a science section was dedicated to this man. Although his theory is widely accepted scientifically it is still hard to grasp his ideas. Especially the idea of unintended change is extremely hard to get. Over and over you see in argumentation that the idea of evolution as striving to a goal, is popping up. We as a human race tend to think backward. We have the illusion that all of the events that lead to the state we are in, are deliberate steps leading towards this state. That is because we think in stories, and in the story lines we are constantly looking for meaning, a plan. I think this is because a meaning and a plan we can understand, and what we can understand we can control in one way or another. This is why the idea of ‘intelligent design’ is so much more easy to understand then the idea of natural selection without any purpose.
For me it took reading ‘the blind watchmaker’ from Richard Dawkins to really grasp this idea of unintended progress, without any plan or preconceived idea. Every next step in evolution as an emerging trend, the consequence of many interactions over a long time. It is apparent that we do have a problem to intuitively understand how complexity can grow out of ’simple laws’. But it is obvious that complexity does always emerge from simple interactions, such as weather systems with extremely high complexity arising from simple interactions between gas molecules.
Dawkins tried to apply the idea of natural selection to our thinking, introducing the concept of ‘memes‘ as the ‘genes of ideas and thinking’. I wonder if we really would need this ‘memes’ concept as a mechanism of how selection could work in ideas. I feel that it is possible to conceive other ’simple’ mechanisms than these mysterious ‘memes’ to account for a natural selection within the thought world. Some interactions are extremely simple: I remember reading Montaillou from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, describing in detail the way the religious ideas spread in this village. What really struck me was the simple explanation: you got ‘infected’ by the new religion by just hearing it from someone you new. It was quite simple to track down the current of the idea by understanding ‘who knew who’ and ‘who met who’. The conviction outcome was like a function of ‘meeting’.
Gladwell dived deeper into this in ‘the tipping point‘, using three simple basic laws as explanation of how ideas spread: the law of the few, the stickyness factor and the power of context. The only law really ‘explaining’ is the law of the few. This law describes in detail different ‘modes’ of infection of ideas by accounting for different kind of persons who spread the ideas. The other two are not really ’simple laws’ . As interesting as they are they are more a description of the the problem than an explanation to the spread of ideas.
Take for instance the ’stickyness factor’. Some ideas seem to have more sticking power than others. This law asks for an explanation. Why is the one idea more sticky than the othert? Why was the sticking power of the religious ideas spread in Montaillou so sticky?
I think the ‘Origin of ideas’, with an explanation of a process that steers the idea evolution would be an important next step in science.
Tags: Darwin, emerging, evolution, gladwell, tipping point