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Example research essay topic: Natural Selection Running Water - 1,716 words

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... within the brains that create them. A child might study a weaverbird building its nest, and then replicate the nest herself, finding the right pieces of grass, and weaving them in the right order, creating, by the very same series of steps, an identical nest. A film of the two building processes occurring side-by-side might overwhelm us with a sense that we were seeing the same phenomenon twice, but it would be a big mistake to impute to the bird the sort of thought processes we know or imagine to be going on in the child.

There could be very little in common between the processes going on in the child's brain and the bird's brain. The bird is (apparently) endowed with a collection of interlocking special-purpose minimalist subroutines, well-designed by evolution according to the notorious "Need to Know Principle" of espionage: give each agent as little information as will suffice for it to accomplish its share of the mission. Control systems designed under this principle can be astonishingly successful -- witness the birds' nests, after all -- whenever the environment has enough simplicity and regularity, and hence predictability, to favor pre design of the whole system. The system's very design in effect makes a prediction -- a wager, in fact -- that the environment will be the way it must be for the system to work. When the complexity of encountered environments rises, however, and unpredictability becomes a more severe problem, a different design principle kicks in: the commando team principle illustrated by such films as "The Guns of Navarone": give each agent as much knowledge about the total project as possible, so that the team has a chance of ad listing appropriately when unanticipated obstacles arise. Fortunately, we don't have to inspect brain processes directly to get evidence of the degree to which one design principle or the other is operating in a particular organism -- although in due course it will be wonderful to get confirmation from neuroscience.

In the meantime, we can conduct experiments that reveal the hidden dissimilarities by showing how bird and child respond to abnormal obstacles and opportunities along the way. My favorite example of such an experiment with beavers is Wilsson (1974): It turns out that beavers hate the sound of running water and will cast about frantically for something -- anything -- that will bring relief; Wilsson played recordings of running water from loudspeakers, and the beavers responded by plastering the loudspeakers with mud. So there is a watershed in the terrain of evolutionary design space; when a control problem lies athwart it, it could be a matter of chance which direction evolution propelled the successful descendants. Perhaps, then, there are two ways of tending fires -- roughly, the beaver-dam way, and our way.

If so, it is a good thing for us that our ancestors didn't hit upon the beaver-dam way, for if they had, the woods might today be full of apes sitting around campfires, but we would not be here to marvel at them. 4. The Tower of Generate-and-Test I want to propose a framework in which we can place the various design options for brains, to see where their power comes from. It is an outrageously oversimplified structure, but idealization is the price one should often be willing to pay for synoptic insight. I will call it the Tower of Generate-and-Test. Endnote 2 In the beginning there was Darwinian evolution of species by natural selection. A variety of candidate organisms were blindly generated by more or less arbitrary processes of recombination and mutation of genes.

These organisms were field tested, and only the best designs survived. This is the ground floor of the tower. Let us call its inhabitants Darwinian creatures. (Is there perhaps a basement? Recently speculations by physicists and cosmologists about the evolution of universes opens the door to such a prospect, but I will not explore it on this occasion.

My topic today is the highest stories of the Tower. ) This process went through many millions of cycles, producing many wonderful designs, both plant and animal, and eventually among its novel creations were some designs with the property of phenotypic plasticity. The individual candidate organisms were not wholly designed at birth, or in other words there were elements of their design that could be adjusted by events that occurred during the field tests. Some of these candidates, we may suppose, were no better off than their hard-wired cousins, since they had no way of favoring (selecting for an encore) the behavioral options they were equipped to "try out", but others, we may suppose, were fortunate enough to have wired-in "reinforcers" that happened to favor Smart Moves, actions that were better for their agents. These individuals thus confronted the environment by generating a variety of actions, which they tried out, one by one, until they found one that "worked." We may call this subset of Darwinian creatures, the creatures with conditional plasticity, Skinnerian creatures, since, as B. F.

Skinner was fond of pointing out, operant conditioning is not just analogous to Darwinian natural selection; it is continuous with it. "Where inherited behavior leaves off, the inherited modifiability of the process of conditioning takes over. " (Skinner, 1953, p. 83) Skinnerian conditioning is a fine capacity to have, so long as you are not killed by one of your early errors. A better system involves predilection among all the possible behaviors or actions, weeding out the truly stupid options before risking them in the harsh world. We human beings are creatures capable of this third refinement, but we are probably not alone. We may call the beneficiaries of this third story in the Tower Popperian creatures, since as Sir Karl Popper once elegantly put it, this design enhancement "permits our hypotheses to die in our stead. " Unlike the merely Skinnerian creatures who survive because they are lucky, we Popperian creatures survive because we " re smart -- of course we " re just lucky to be smart, but that's better than just being lucky. Endnote 3 But how is this predilection in Popperian agents to be done? Where is the feedback to come from?

It must come from a sort of inner environment -- an inner something-or-other that is structured in such a way that the surrogate actions it favors are more often than not the very actions the real world would also bless, if they were actually performed. In short, the inner environment, whatever it is, must contain lots of information about the outer environment and its regularities. Nothing else (except magic) could provide predilection worth having. Now here we must be very careful not to think of this inner environment as simply a replica of the outer world, with all its physical contingencies reproduced. (In such a miraculous toy world, the little hot stove in your head would be hot enough to actually burn the little finger in your head that you placed on it! ) The information about the world has to be there, but it also has to be structured in such a way that there is a non-miraculous explanation of how it got there, how it is maintained, and how it actually achieves the pre selective effects that are its raison d'^etre. We have now reached the story of the Tower on which I want to build. Once we get to Popperian creatures, creatures whose brains have the potential to be shaped into inner environments with pre selective prowess, what happens next?

How does new information about the outer environment get incorporated into these brains? This is where earlier design decisions -- and in particular, choices between Need to Know and Commando Team -- come back to haunt the designer; for if a particular species' brain design has already gone down the Need to Know path with regard to some control problem, only minor modifications (fine tuning, you might say) can be readily made to the existing structures, so the only hope of making a major revision of the internal environment to account for new problems, new features of the external environment that matter, is to submerge the old hard-wiring under a new layer of pre-emptive control (a theme developed in the work of the AI researcher Rodney Brooks). It is these higher levels of control that have the potential for vast increases in versatility. And it is at these levels in particular, that we should look for the role of language (when it finally arrives on the scene), in turning our brains into virtuoso pre-selectors.

We engage in our share of rather mindless routine behavior, but our important acts are often directed on the world with incredible cunning, composing projects exquisitely designed under the influence of vast libraries of information about the world. The instinctual actions we share with other species show the benefits derived by the harrowing explorations of our ancestors. The imitative actions we share with some higher animals may show the benefits of information gathered not just by our ancestors, but also by our social groups over generations, transmitted non-genetically by a "tradition" of imitation. But our more deliberatively planned acts show the benefits of information gathered and transmitted by our conspecific's in every culture, including, moreover, items of information that no single individual has embodied or understood in any sense. And while some of this information may be of rather ancient acquisition, much of it is brand new. When comparing the time scales of genetic and cultural evolution, it is useful to bear in mind that we here today -- every one of us -- can easily understand many ideas that were simply unthinkable by the geniuses in our grandparents' generation!

The successors to mere Popperian creatures are those whose inner environments are informed by the designed portions of the outer environment. We may call this sub-sub-subset of Darwinian creatures Gregorian creatures, since Richard Gregory, the first speaker in this series, is to my mind the pre-eminent theorist of the role of information -- or more exactly, what Gregory calls Potential Intelligence -- in the creation of Smart Moves -- or what Gregory calls Kinetic Intelligence. Gregory observes that a pair of scissors, as a well-designed artifact, is not just a result of intelligence, but an endower of intelligence...


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Research essay sample on Natural Selection Running Water

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