Example research essay topic: Selfish Gene Cambridge Ma - 1,710 words

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... duces for the powers of language-less thought is thus potentially misleading. These varieties of language-less thought, like barefoot waterskiing, may be possible only for brief periods, and only after a preparatory period that includes the very feature whose absence is later so striking. There are indirect ways of testing the hypotheses implied by these doubts.

Consider episodic memory, for instance. When a dog retrieves a bone it has buried, it manifests an effect on its memory, but must the dog, in retrieving the bone, actually recollect the episode of burying? (Perhaps you can name the current U. S. Secretary of State, but can you recall the occasion of learning his name? ) The capacity for genuine episodic recollecting -- as opposed to semantic memory installed by a single episode of learning -- is in need of careful analysis and investigation. Donald follows Jane Goodall in claiming that chimpanzees in the wild are "able to perceive social events accurately and to remember them" (p. 157) -- as episodes in memory. But we have not really been given any evidence from which this strong thesis follows; the social perspicuity of the chimpanzees might be largely due to specialized perceptual talents interacting with specialized signs -- suppose, for instance, that there is something subtle about the posture of a subordinate facing a superior that instantly -- visually -- tells an observer chimp (but not an human observer) which is subordinate, and how much.

Experiments that would demonstrate a genuine capacity for episodic memory in chimpanzees would have to involve circumstances in which a episode was observed or experienced, but in which its relevance as a premise for some social inference was not yet determined -- so no "inference" could be drawn at once. If something that transpired later suddenly gave a retrospective relevance to the earlier episode, and if a chimpanzee can tumble to that fact, this would be evidence -- but not yet conclusive evidence -- of episodic memory. Another way of testing for episodic memory in the absence of language would be to let a chimpanzee observe -- once -- a relatively novel and elaborate behavioral sequence that accomplishes some end (e. g. , to make the door open, you stamp three times, turn in a circle and then push both buttons at once), and see if the chimpanzee, faced with the need to accomplish the same end, can even come close to reproducing the sequence. It is not that there is any doubt that chimpanzee brain tissue is capable of storing this much information -- it can obviously store vastly more than is required for such a simple feat -- but whether the chimpanzee can exploit this storage medium in such an adaptive way on short notice. And that is the sort of question that no amount of microscopic brain-study is going to shed much light on. 7.

The art of making mistakes: the next story This brings me to my final step up the Tower of Generate-and-Test. There is one more embodiment of this wonderful idea, and it is the one that gives our minds their greatest power: once we have language -- a bountiful kit of mind-tools -- we can use them in the structure of deliberate, foresight ful generate-and-test known as science. All the other varieties of generate-and-test are willy-nilly. The soliloquy that accompanies the errors committed by the lowliest Skinnerian creature might be "Well, I mustn't do that again!" and the hardest lesson for any agent to learn, apparently, is how to learn from one's own mistakes. In order to learn from them, one has to be able to contemplate them, and this is no small matter. Life rushes on, and unless one has developed positive strategies for recording one's tracks, the task known in AI as credit assignment (also, known, of course, as blame assignment! ) is insoluble.

The advent of high-speed still photography was a revolutionary technological advance for science because it permitted human beings, for the first time, to examine complicated temporal phenomena not in real time, but in their own good time -- in leisurely, methodical backtracking analysis of the traces they had created of those complicated events. Here a technological advance carried in its wake a huge enhancement in cognitive power. The advent of language was an exactly parallel boon for human beings, a technology that created a whole new class of objects-to-contemplate, verbally embodied surrogates that could be reviewed in any order at any pace. And this opened up a new dimension of self-improvement -- all one had to do was to learn to savor one's own mistakes.

But science is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections. It has been plausibly maintained, by Nicholas Humphrey, David Premack and others, that chimpanzees are natural psychologists -- what I would call second-order intentional systems -- but if they are, they nevertheless lack a crucial feature shared by all human natural psychologists, folk and professional varieties: they never get to compare notes. They never dispute over attributions, and ask for the grounds for each others' conclusions. No wonder their comprehension is so limited. Ours would be, too, if we had to generate it all on our own.

Let me sum up the results of my rather swift and superficial survey. Our human brains, and only human brains, have been armed by habits and methods, mind-tools and information, drawn from millions of other brains to which we are not genetically related. This, amplified by the deliberate use of generate-and-test in science, puts our minds on a different plane from the minds of our nearest relatives among the animals. This species-specific process of enhancement has become so swift and powerful that a single generation of its design improvements can now dwarf the R-and-D efforts of millions of years of evolution by natural selection. So while we cannot rule out the possibility in principle that our minds will be cognitively closed to some domain or other, no good "naturalistic" reason to believe this can be discovered in our animal origins.

On the contrary, a proper application of Darwinian thinking suggests that if we survive our current self-induced environmental crises, our capacity to comprehend will continue to grow by increments that are now incomprehensible to us. Further Reading Rodney Brooks, 1991, "Intelligence Without Representation, " Artificial Intelligence Journal, 47, pp. 139 - 59. William Calvin, 1990, The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence, New York: Bantam Richard Dawkins, 1976, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Daniel Dennett, "The brain and its boundaries, " review of McGinn, 1990, in TLS, May 10, 1991 (corrected by erratum notice on May 24, p 29). Jared Diamond, 1992, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, New York: Harper Merlin Donald, 1991, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.

Press Richard Gregory 1981, Mind in Science, Cambridge Univ. Press. Ray Jackendoff, 1987, Consciousness and the Computational Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/A Bradford Book. Julian Jaynes, 1976, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Frank Keil, forthcoming, "The Origins of an Autonomous Biology, " in Minnesota Symposium, [details forthcoming] Alan Leslie, 1992, "Pretense, Autism and the Theory-of-Mind Module, " Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1, pp. 18 - 21. Colin McGinn, 1990, The Problem of Consciousness, Oxford: Blackwell. Allen Newell, 1990, United Theories of Cognition, Harvard Univ.

Press. Howard Margolis, 1987, Patterns, Thinking and Cognition, Univ. of Chicago Press. Andr'e Roche Lecours and Yves Joanette, "Linguistic and Other Psychological Aspects of Praoxysmal Aphasia, " Brain and Language, 10, pp. 1 - 23, 1980. John Holland, "Complex Adaptive Systems, " Daedalus, Winter, 1992, p 25. Nicholas Humphrey, 1986, The Inner Eye, London: Faber & Faber.

David Premack, 1986, Gavagai! Or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. B. F. Skinner, 1953, Science and Human Behavior, New York: MacMillan. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, 1986, Relevance: a Theory of Communication, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.

Press. L. Wilson, 1974, "Observations and Experiments on the Ethology of the European Beaver, " Viltrevy, Swedish Wildlife, 8, pp. 115 - 266. Endnotes 1. See the discussion of Steven Kosslyn's concept of "visual genera tivity" and its relation to language, in Donald, 1991, pp. 72 - 5. 2. This is an elaboration of ideas to be found in my "Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away, " 1974, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, 5, pp. 169 - 87, reprinted in Brainstorms, 1978. 3.

For more on the relationship between luck and talent (and free will and responsibility), see my Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, 1984. 4. R. Dawkins, 1976, The Selfish Gene, Oxford Univ. Press. See also my discussions of the concept in "Memes and the Exploitation of the Imagination, " Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1990, 48, pp. 127 - 35. and in my book, Consciousness Explained, 1991. 5.

This idea is defended in chapters 7 and 8 of Consciousness Explained. 6. See my review of Newell, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence, special issue devoted to Newell's book. 7. Cf. Dennett, 1991, "Mother Nature versus the Walking Encyclopedia, " in W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and D.

Rumelhart, eds. , Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 8. Such belief-like states are what I have called "opinions" (in Brainstorms, ch. 16. ) 9. In Consciousness Explained, I deliberately made up -- as an implausible but possible fiction -- a case of temporary total aphasia: "there is an herb an overdose of which makes you incapable of understanding spoken sentences in your native language... , " adding that for all I knew, it might be fact, not fiction (p. 69). If Brother John's epilepsy could be brought on by an overdose of an herb, the case would be complete -- if Brother John's case is the fact it seems to be. A review of the original report (Roche Lecours and Joanette, 1980) leaves unanswered questions, but no grounds for dismissal that I could detect.

Research essay sample on Selfish Gene Cambridge Ma