First, second and third replicators according to Susan Blackmore, the origin of life and the general scheme of phase transitions in evolution. Column for Kompyuterra #99

{"author": "Dmytro Shabanov", "title": "Gessner's Error or Defense against the Sea Devil: How the Mechanism of Science Functions; First, Second, and Third Replicators according to Susan Blackmore, the Origin of Life, and the General Scheme of Phase Transitions in Evolution; The Hundredth Column: an Attempt to Catch One's Breath, Look Around, and Understand What I Am Doing and Why", "subtitle": "Column for Kompyuterra #98; Column for Kompyuterra #99; Column for Kompyuterra #100", "content": "I will not address the electrifying topic of the previous two columns; I will talk here about memetics — whether a science or merely a research program, about which I myself only learned a little more recently. As an introduction to the problem of memetics, I suggest the corresponding Wikipedia page — it is written quite well.\n\nI became interested in memetics after watching Susan Blackmore's lecture at TED. I highly recommend it; for those who, like me, have difficulty understanding English by ear (alas...), there are Russian subtitles available as well.\n\nSusan Blackmore is, of course, an extraordinary personality. As can be seen from her website, her interests include Zen Buddhism, parapsychology, atheism, legalization of soft drugs, samba performance, and much more, including evolutionary theory and memetics. She is an independent journalist and a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth. She is one of the leaders of naturalism — a truly interesting worldview that, according to its proponents, should replace humanism.\n\nTo begin with — a minimal primer. The foundations of memetics were laid by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins considered replicators — units capable of copying. The hereditary information-carrying unit that is copied is, as is well known, the gene. However, at least two systems of information transmission influence human development and behavior — genetic and cultural (cultural inheritance — the transmission of behavioral traits through learning). Considering the analogy between genetic and cultural inheritance, Dawkins proposed a name for the unit of cultural inheritance — the meme (from Greek μίμημα — imitation). A meme is information that is copied, transmitted from person to person.\n\nI will quote Wikipedia, the place where the mentioned article references Susan Blackmore's book.\n\n\"To recognize that culture is subject to the laws of Darwinism, it is sufficient to discover that its units exhibit three key qualities of the Darwinist model — heritability, variability, and reproduction at different frequencies. It is precisely this that leads to the fact that over time, the most well-adapted units of culture spread widely, while poorly adapted ones disappear. To reproduce successfully, units of cultural information must strive for three other goals — maximum accuracy of their transmission (to avoid mutations), the widest possible distribution, and reproduction for as long as possible. Those of them that best solve these three tasks are the triumphators in the process of cultural evolution.\"\n\nI would, of course, say that to evaluate the reproduction of replicators, only two parameters are sufficient: the accuracy of replication and its efficiency (the average number of 'infected' per carrier). Long-term reproduction is a consequence of these two parameters.\n\nAnd one more remark: 'Darwinism' in this argument is not the outdated name of evolutionary biology, but specifically the Darwinian mechanism of changes. Blackmore calls it 'universal Darwinism'.\n\nAs it turns out, the ideas of memetics are currently being promoted in Russia by historian Ilya Nossyrev, author of the recently published book Masters of Illusions: How Ideas Turn Us into Slaves. Alas, I have not yet found his book, but at least I understood that the main theme that interests him is the mechanism of religion's spread. In this regard, Nossyrev develops the ideas expressed by Dawkins in The God Delusion. An interesting thought from Nossyrev's speech at the presentation of his book is that modern religions, due to selection for transmission efficiency, are becoming increasingly more totalitarian. Alas, the accuracy and efficiency of reproduction of a rigid, individuality-suppressing worldview is higher than that of a liberal one. With the growth of our world, with the growth of the number and efficiency of communications between meme carriers, exactly those memes will grow that appear most frightening to an outside observer. You see, this is the very conflict between the whole and the part that I have written about in many recent columns. Let's consider an example. The spread of a rigid, totalitarian meme (Nossyrev uses the Skoptsy sect as an example) harms the group of people in which it occurs. Alas, this may not stop the spread of the meme itself: as long as it is transmitted efficiently and its carriers manage to spread it further.\n\nBut our conversation is not about this, but about Blackmore's ideas. She identified three types of replicators.\n\nThe first replicators, according to Blackmore, are genes.\n\nThe second replicators are memes: structures transmitted from one person's consciousness to another's.\n\nThe third replicators are informational structures that spread in an environment created without direct human participation, in the space of interacting technical devices. Blackmore calls them 'temes' (in the Russian equivalent, probably t-memes).\n\nHow can such a classification be useful? Blackmore discusses one example. Do you remember the Drake equation? The formula that allows one to estimate the number of potentially contactable civilizations in the galaxy? It operates with such quantities as the fraction of suitable planets, the probability of life arising, the probability of intelligence arising, the lifetime of a contactable civilization...\n\nBlackmore proposes a different formula. The fraction of planets where the first replicator will arise, where the second will arise, and where the third will arise (and, naturally, the time of existence of third replicators on the planet). The thing is that each subsequent transition is dangerous and can lead to extinction. You can listen to what Blackmore says about this, but I will draw attention to other aspects.\n\nHow does the transition to the next level of replicators occur — let's call it a phase transition in evolution?\n\nA set of interacting (=competing and cooperating) replicators creates an environment in which interacting replicators of another type begin to reproduce.\n\nA situation arises that can be considered in two additional ways (in the sense of Niels Bohr's complementarity principle). For example, organisms that transmit memes to each other can be described in two ways.\n\nOn one hand, we see organisms adapting to the environment that have developed the ability to transmit adaptive behavioral traits to each other; certainly, non-adaptive or even harmful traits can be transmitted this way, but we will consider such a situation abnormal.\n\nOn the other hand, we see an environment in which memes spread and interact; from this point of view, it is not so important whether they are useful or not for organisms, what matters is how effectively they spread.\n\nUtility and efficiency of spread — connected (non-orthogonal) traits of memes. A completely harmful meme will spread poorly because its carriers will disappear; a useful one will receive support in spreading from its carriers, but nevertheless, there will exist a category of not very harmful but very effectively transmitted memes. If there are many such memes, they can lead to the death of the population of their carriers...\n\nWithout delving into a discussion of varieties of harmful memes, I will give one example.\n\n\"— What, you still use that outdated model?! Don't you know what's fashionable now?\"\n\nTry to evaluate how such an approach intensifies humanity's depleting impact on its environment. The phenomenon of fashion is entirely built on rapidly succeeding memes. If it were possible to turn off this powerful engine of consumerism, the carrying capacity of the environment for humanity (the number of people our planet can provide with everything necessary) would substantially increase.\n\nLet's return to the description of the phase transition. It works not only in relation to the series of replicators that Blackmore considers. It also works in the transition from the population level to the community level. Organisms, reproducing, create an environment in which parasites and symbionts can exist. In a certain sense, all exploiters (predators in the broad sense, including parasites) and mutualists exist in an environment created by their prey/hosts/partners. And their joint population dynamics can be considered from two sides, looking from the side of both one and the other species! Moreover, in the case of exploiters, the situation is asymmetrical (there are prey creating the environment, and there are exploiters who use it), while in the case of mutualists, there is even some symmetry: each population creates an environment for the other.\n\nConsider what a field for modeling opens up in the study of such systems! Among other things, many collisions will arise there, corresponding to the archetype of conflict of interests at different levels of optimization (with the manifestation of action of both the Invisible Hand and the Invisible Foot)!\n\nAnd now I suggest you consider whether the list of replicators that Blackmore proposes is complete. Are genes really the first replicators in Earth's history? No, of course not.\n\nTo begin with, organisms are also replicators. Dawkins quite rightly draws attention to the fact that not all properties of organisms are transmitted to their copies, but it is impossible to deny such transmission. By the way, I think that offspring inherit from parents not only genetic information but also other information (up to positional information — in what place and habitat the organism is located). Organisms are those replicators on the example of which Darwin discovered natural selection!\n\nDawkins (at least according to The Extended Phenotype) understands perfectly well that an organism is not simply a projection of its genes. Dawkins's supporters, as far as I can understand, do not always realize this. Organisms are also replicators, and their predecessors are older than genes! It is incorrect to pose the question of what the units of selection are, what evolves: on one hand, organisms changing genes, on the other — genes changing organisms.\n\nI have already had to write about the epigenetic theory of evolution, ETE. One of its differences from the synthetic theory, STE, is that the emergence of genetic inheritance is a fully explicable phenomenon for ETE. STE focuses on heredity as the ability of genes to transmit themselves from generation to generation. How this ability arose cannot be explained using STE's logic — STE simply cannot consider evolution in which there are no genes! For ETE, the key idea is the stability of replicator reproduction; heredity is the result of selection. That heredity is provided not only by genes is a natural consequence of the basic principles for ETE, but for STE it is a shock to the foundations.\n\nAnd what was before genes? Interacting autocatalytic reactions — I explained this in the column on prebiological selection. And these reactions were selected for efficiency and stability!\n\nSo, I formulate a hypothesis (I invented it myself, but I have no grounds to claim that I was the first to do so — I have often had to 'reinvent the wheel'; perhaps this idea has been known to someone for a long time).\n\nThe origin of life is connected with phase transition #1, when in the environment of a periodically shifting equilibrium of reversible chemical reactions, replicators spread — autocatalytic reactions. The interaction (competition and 'cooperation') of these reactions leads to the emergence of their coadapted complexes — protocells (probably delimited by membranes or other phase boundaries).\n\nPhase transition #2 consists in the fact that in this environment of protocells, replicators of another type spread — RNA ones. They infect protoorganisms, as viruses infect cells today! And, as happens with parasites, selection for the stability of their transmission leads to the fact that some of them become not harmful, but useful.\n\nPhase transition #3 is symbiogenesis, during which other cells — parasitic, and then endosymbiotic, ultimately forming the eukaryotic cell — a cell with a flexible development program — settle in the environment of some cells.\n\nIn another direction, transition #3' is directed, leading to the existence of biotic communities, with a diversity of types of relationships between populations. This, the third-bis, transition occurs both before and after the one we designated as the third. We will not include it in the general count of evolutionary phase transitions; we will attribute it to ecological phase transitions.\n\nThe emergence of memes in this logic is transition #4, of t-memes — #5. The thing is that t-memes can arise only by mastering an environment based on a very complex memefund.\n\nBy the way, I think that interaction between different planetary civilizations will require yet another phase transition. Memes and t-memes transmitted between planets must be very specific informational constructions, if only because they are addressed to informational systems with other (initially unknown) properties, supported by an unknown memefund.\n\n...I will continue thinking about this. And what thoughts do you have about this?"}