Epistolution Musing No 12: Beauty
Dear Friends,
This letter is part of a weekly series of brief thoughts I would like to share with you, either because I’ve come across your related work in biology or because you’re a person I like. I discovered an interesting problem in 2019, a problem I can’t forget.
Our predominant theories assume that the organized appearance of life and the reliable recurrence of ontogeny are due to genetic influences. In this view, the genome even carries responsibility for producing learning. Learning is thought to be present only in complex structures like brains, and it is assumed to be aimed at solving problems related to survival and reproduction. I believe this is wrong on all three counts. The theory of life, including Darwinian natural selection, only makes sense if a form of learning is present in every living cell that aims to find new problems and solve them. This form of learning can’t be a consequence of inherited genes because it purposefully deploys heritable material, using it for its own contingent, adaptive ends, and inheritance would be impossible without it. I’ve named this unknown mechanism “epistolution,” to distinguish it from other concepts of learning. Although all ontogeny requires epistolution, especially clear examples include embryonic development, wound healing, regeneration, cancer, memory, dreaming, creativity, swarm intelligence, epigenetic inheritance, and the placebo effect. These essays are an attempt to clarify epistolution so that it can be studied in detail in laboratories, and to imagine what exactly the societal consequences will be when we decipher this unknown mechanism.
My mother loves camellias. In her small garden, in front of her wide wooden porch in Belhaven, she has always grown four or five camellia bushes that bloom fragrantly each spring and summer. During the warm months when company is arriving, she plucks the camellia blossoms and floats them in water in a white ringed dish as a centerpiece on her dining room table. Her mother, whom we called Mama Tee, planted dozens of camellias in a broad yard under longleaf pines in Marion County, took them to church and funerals. Some may have been on her own casket for all I can remember. My friend Jim’s family went even further, planting forty acres of camellias and azaleas in their woodland at Zemurray Gardens.
One can comprehend the value of a plant like maize, a nutritious grain, but on a scientific level the human affection for the camellia is quite mystifying. Why has an omnivorous ape species become so fond of a poisonous flowering bush? We derive no nutrition from it. Plants are our survival helpers. Why are we exerting so much energy propagating, tending, naming, breeding, cutting, and displaying such an unlikely partner?
In the 1870s, an Austrian physicist and philosopher named Ludwig Boltzmann obtained a formula describing thermodynamics after having an epiphany. His realization was that the entropy of a system was equal to the log probability of it being in any particular “macrostate.” By this, Boltzmann was able to convert entropy (disorder) into a measurable, even countable property. This became a basic principle of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the part of physics that describes how disorder tends to increase in the universe. In this section I will explain how this peculiar law explains a strange feature of humanity, and I suggest, of all life; our drive to discover and encourage beauty.
To make this idea of probability visual, think of a billiard table in which the balls are scattered in disarray. In this sort of “macrostate,” each of the balls might have arrived in its position in many different ways, from many different directions. Now envision a billiard table in which all the balls are neatly aligned along one edge. In the more ordered system, each of the balls could only have arrived in its position from one direction, in a particular order and at certain definite angles. This is a low probability state, a situation much less likely to have happened by chance unless a force had been applied. Later, this idea of “negative entropy” was elaborated by Irwin Schrodinger in a short, readable book called What is Life?. Schrodinger claimed that reduction of disorder, or “sucking order out of the environment” was a key distinction, in physical terms, between life and nonlife.
This way of thinking about order and disorder provides a good explanation for why the field of conventional origin-of-life biochemistry has made very little progress. According to a new paper by Elbert Branscomb, Boltzmann’s casino and the unbridgeable chasm in emergence of life research, the boundary between life and nonlife is not a matter of a somewhat arbitrary combination of ordinary chemistry that might have happened long ago to initiate the metabolic process, but rather an ongoing sorting process that captures order from the environment and retains it inside cells. Branscomb describes molecular “machines” in cell membranes, among other places, that use energy to disorganize the outer environment in exchange for ordering the internal environment. This cumulative process means that the chemistry of life happens far from thermodynamic equilibrium. This state or orderliness in the cell makes biochemistry very distinct from ordinary chemistry, where mass reactions can follow thermodynamic gradients with predictable consequences. Biochemistry, because, Branscomb believes, it swaps order for order, follows a different logic entirely, a logic that has not been elucidated yet.
When I scale this idea up, I imagine that Branscomb’s “machines” have the effect of making life forms thirsty not so much for energy but for improbable macrostates. In order to benefit thermodynamically from a new form of order, the life form must be continually combing the world for forms of order that haven’t already been incorporated into its cells. Order that has already been incorporated or encountered won’t do the trick. The idea is that the function of life is swapping, somehow, order in the environment for order in the body. I invented a word for this that I mentioned in the last section, “incumulation.” It was the idea that knowledge is penetrating the body and becoming part of it, not in the same form but in terms of its effect on the internal conformation of the cells and tissues. “Incumulation” means that life craves not only recognizable patterns, but new forms of order that have not already been understood.
I hypothesize that this order-sucking function is the same as the search for beauty. Beauty is not present in a pattern that is fully known; these patterns are boring. For example imagine a chessboard endlessly repeating white and black squares. It’s also not present in patterns that are too obscure or uninterpretable. For example imagine white noise or the static on an old-fashioned TV screen. It’s in the edge cases, where truths are sensed but not known yet, tantalizing, formed but not overdetermined, symmetrical, but not perfect. Beauty, to an observer, must be a form of order that has not already been incumulated, which makes sense of why it is so culturally sensitive and individually subjective. Cultures are bodies of knowledge. Within each culture, certain truths are known and others unknown. Since ones’ body of knowledge shapes what forms of order one’s cells already possess, a certain culture can be bored with a whole realm of aesthetics, or fascinated by it. I think of the medieval Islamic fascination with tessellated patterns, or the Japanese sense of proportion and perspective in woodcut prints.
I sense that beauty must be something universal to life. But if so, it is as diverse, as open-ended as the umwelts of all living observers. Think of the beauty of sexually selected animals and flowering plants and other organisms that compete based on sight. Any organism that needs to appeal to other organisms as pollinators or potential mates by sight ends up becoming beautiful. There are counterexamples in the deep sea and in caves where sight doesn’t function and organisms tend to evolve ugliness. In these repulsive cases, simple selection creates new forms, and epistolution works on dimensions other than the visual.
The question at stake isn’t why random appendages and odd behaviors are elaborated; that is explained well by genetic evolution. Darwin first wrote the theory of sexual selection. Richard Prum, for example, has written a good account of why sexual selection causes random traits to become exaggerated in his book entitled The Evolution of Beauty. But this discourse misses the main point. The question is not why sexual selection happens, but rather why these random appendages, sounds, and behaviors are beautiful rather than ugly. Why in particular are they beautiful across species boundaries, where no survival or reproductive value is possible? There is a good reason why human men and women should be beautiful to one another, but why birds, flowers, mushrooms, foggy mountains, and crashing waves? None of the real essence of beauty is explained by genetics. Only the fact that some characteristic is elaborated makes sense, not the fact that it tends to be a beautiful characteristic.
Nor does it strike me as a scientific attitude to pretend that because it is difficult to quantify or measure in an objective way, beauty doesn’t exist. If we view whatever is creating and sustaining the sense of beauty and curiosity as something that is occurring between an organism and its umwelt, by definition it cannot be fully shareable or objective. It’s a subjective experience, but that is also true of all experience. Experience is what science seeks to understand, not just the objectively measurable aspects of experience, but all of it. As David Deutsch says, science is the search for explanations. So Branscomb’s conclusions about the role of Boltzmann’s formula for entropy in the emergence of life are an explanation for why organisms, ourselves included, are continually searching for patterns that are not quite known. Our cells are craving new forms of order. This incumulation is the purpose life seeks.
For #5, epistolution is anti-entropic, it means that an epistevolver should be unable to incumulate knowledge without increasing the entropy of its environment. I believe that this will be a property of learning that we can model even in artificial virtual environments, but I’m not entirely certain. If this requires physical embodiment, then it will slow down the search for the epistolution mechanism significantly since these real-world physical models will be much harder and more costly to develop.
Be Kind, and Be Brave,
Love, Charlie
