From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Can your children read road maps as easily as you do or have they become dependent on GPS to guide them? How concerned should we be that we are dumbing ourselves down by our growing reliance on intelligent machines?

Some folks might wish to treat the question of why ice floats as inviting a what for reason—God’s reason, presumably—for this feature of the inanimate world. (“I guess God wanted fish to be able to live under the ice in the winter, and if ponds froze from the bottom up, this would be hard on the fish.”) But as long as we have an answer to the how c

How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn’t build on its own?

To summarize, animals, plants, and even microorganisms are equipped with competences that permit them to deal appropriately with the affordances of their environments. There are free-floating rationales for all these competences, but the organisms need not appreciate or comprehend them to benefit from them, nor do they need to be conscious of them.

So he concluded that minds like his (and yours) were not material entities, like lungs or brains, but made of some second kind of stuff that didn’t have to obey the laws of physics—articulating the view known as dualism, and, often, Cartesian dualism. This idea that mind isn’t matter and matter can’t be mind was not invented by Descartes.

Next come the Skinnerian creatures, who have, in addition to their hard-wired dispositions, the key disposition to adjust their behavior in reaction to “reinforcement”; they more or less randomly generate new behaviors to test in the world; those that get reinforced (with positive reward or by the removal of an aversive stimulus—pain or hunger, for

creationists ask, rhetorically, “where does all the information in the DNA come from?” and Darwin’s answer is simple: it comes from the gradual, purposeless, nonmiraculous transformation of noise into signal, over billions of years.

Perhaps the best way of seeing the reality, indeed the ubiquity in Nature, of reasons is to reflect on the different meanings of “why.” The English word is equivocal, and the main ambiguity is marked by a familiar pair of substitute phrases: what for? and how come?” “Why are you handing me your camera?” asks what are you doing this for? “Why does i

a fortuitously “good” mutation almost never happens. But evolution depends on those rarest of rare events.

Humans are representational magpies—think of how incredibly rich forager fauna and floras are—much of their natural history information has no practical value. Once information storage (in the head and out of the head) became cheap, the magpie habit is adaptive, because it is so hard to tell in advance which of the informational odds and ends will