Café Scientifique and Jack Cohen

Sep 4, 2005 Alun Science 3 Comments Biology, Evolution, Extelligence

I vis­ited Café Sci­en­ti­fique in Leicester for the first time on Tues­day even­ing. Café Sci­en­ti­fique is a brand name for informal sci­entific sem­inars that are open to the pub­lic. It’s an idea I’ve been excited about for a while, but not so excited that I’ve actu­ally gone to one. There isn’t one in Derby, so it means a trip out in the even­ing to visit Leicester or Shef­field. The reason I went along was that Jack Cohen was giv­ing the talk, “Life Else­where”. The aim of the talk was rather like his recent book Evolov­ing the Alien. He’s inter­ested in how much of the evol­u­tion of Earth’s life was inev­it­able and how much is down to his­tor­ical con­tin­gency.

His approach is to divide bio­lo­gical innov­a­tions into ‘uni­ver­sals’ and ‘paro­chi­als’. Paro­chi­als only happened once in his­tory so there’s evid­ence that you would expect them to appear if life star­ted again, or was found on another planet. Uni­ver­sals are things that appear over and over again inde­pend­ently. Examples of uni­ver­sals would be things like eyes, flight, pho­to­syn­thesis and sex. These are all solu­tions to prob­lems that have occurred sev­eral times by dif­fer­ing routes in the past.

Paro­chi­als are things like the food­way cross­ing the air­way, or gen­it­als and waste emis­sion being part of the same pack­age. This ini­tially looks weird. There are so many anim­als which breathe and eat through their mouths. How can this be paro­chial? The answer is that the innov­a­tion only happened once. It happened in the dis­tant past in the creature that land based anim­als evolved from. So although this fea­ture is every­where it’s paro­chial because all these creatures inher­ited it, it wasn’t an innov­a­tion. Insects for instance took a dif­fer­ent route, breath­ing through spir­acles in their body. This wouldn’t scale very well, but it shows there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

This leaves the ques­tion is intel­li­gence uni­ver­sal or paro­chial? Or rather is extel­li­gence, the inform­a­tion we keep out­side of our bod­ies, uni­ver­sal or paro­chial? Extel­li­gence has only occurred once in Earth’s his­tory, in human­ity. That would sug­gest it’s paro­chial. How­ever, breath­ing oxy­gen might also be a paro­chial. The shift from meth­ane to oxy­gen atmo­sphere only happened once in Earth’s his­tory. That would make it paro­chial. Except once this shift had occurred, the rules of the game had changed so it couldn’t hap­pen again. Does this mean that oxy­gen is a paro­chial, or would have it have happened sooner or later any­way, which would make it universal?

This is a sim­ilar prob­lem to extel­li­gence. The first spe­cies to develop a good extel­li­gence suc­ceeded at the expense of oth­ers, either by con­flict or out-competing other hom­in­ids. So is extel­li­gence a one-off or was it a race to see who got it first Homo Sapi­ens or Homo Neanderthalensis?

Cohen is a good speaker, though I can see how he could be intim­id­at­ing. He opened with a car­toon. A woman intro­duced a man at a party as an expert on cro­codiles, and he replied, “Madam, you’re too kind, my spe­ci­al­ity is cro­codile eye­lids.” That, Cohen said was one type of sci­ent­ist, and he was the other sort. He doesn’t assume he’s right about everything, he noted in his talk the sen­sa­tion of feel­ing sure and being right felt exactly the same as the sen­sa­tion of feel­ing sure and being wrong. He does assume that he’s talk­ing to someone of high intel­li­gence and can leap from sub­ject to sub­ject. He’s per­fectly polite in deal­ing with ques­tions, but it can be intim­id­at­ing stop­ping him while in full flow. A bit like stop­ping the per­form­ance of an opera to ask what a par­tic­u­lar obscure word was.

The talk came in sec­tions with ques­tions fol­low­ing and reg­u­lar breaks to get drinks. I thought some of the audi­ence were a bit hung up on defin­i­tions like “What is a tool?” I sus­pect of we find extra-terrestrial life we won’t be examin­ing them with a check-list and ignor­ing them if they don’t meet our pre-conceptions of what they should be. There was some philo­soph­ical wad­ing into what sort of tool math­em­at­ics is. I was pleased to hear Ian Stew­art in their new book will argue it’s a social con­struct. After read­ing Sundar Sarukkai’s stuff I’m inclined to think of math­em­at­ics as a pecu­liar form of language.

All-in-all it was a good night out. After this even­ing I’m not able to wander into the evol­u­tion­ary bio­logy sec­tion of the lib­rary and pen­cil in cor­rec­tions to the text­books, but at least I have an idea what the ques­tions are.