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Graphic of the Haymarket Riot from Harpers Weekly

Evolution And Individuals

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Posts in this series

The Individual In Contemporary Society
Evolution And Individuals
Maturing In US Society

The first post in this series took up the question of the nature of the individual in contemporary US society.  I think answering this question is necessary if we are to create a theory of government for our time.

An evolutionary tale

Let’s start with a story. I can’t remember where I found the story I’m about to tell. Maybe it was The Evolution of Agency by Michael Tomasello, or The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, or maybe Eve by Cat Bohannon, or maybe something I ran across while writing about those books, or a combination of these.

Of course we will never know the “truth” about evolution, and there’s always a danger of falling for just-so stories. But this tale seems plausible and I’ll point out some circumstantial evidence.

As our ancestors evolved, they moved around in loose groups. The change began about 6 million years ago. Perhaps a group of primates got cut off from the rest by a rising river or an earthquake, or maybe they just wandered too far to be reunited. Conditions changed in the new area, resulting in less food. This led to smaller and weaker creatures. They were easy prey for other larger, stronger creatures with sharper ears, eyes and noses.

Their survival came to depend on their ability to cooperate. One form of cooperation might have been scavenging. After one of the big predators made a kill and gorged, the scavengers appear: jackals, hyenas, vultures. Our ancestors may have worked together. One or more scare off the other scavengers while others rip at the carcass. They run away and share the prize. Or it might have been cooperative hunting, where the victory is, again, shared.

Chimpanzees and other primates in and near our line of evolution do not cooperate in hunting. They may work side by side, but if they succeed, there is no sharing. Every chimp grabs what it can, whether or not it participated in the hunt.

In either case, or otherwise, about two million years ago, they began to use tools. Maybe they started with sticks and rocks. Eventually they learned how shape tools. This is a learned and teachable behavior.

Social cooperation requires the ability to recognize the existence of others as similar to oneself. When I feel a certain way, my body does X. If I see a creature doing X, I assume they feel like I would if I exhibited that behavior. From there, more and more complex social interactions can develop. Hunting can proceed by explicit agreement. Simple hand signals and noises can be used to indicate planning and the means of cooperation.

Over the next 1.6 million years, brains gradually grow larger. From the shape of fossil skulls we can guess that the parts of the head that grew are those necessary to accommodate the parts of the brain used in social interactions. The larger heads change the way the female body was shaped and the way they gave birth. The difficulty of birth required increased social cooperation, probably centered on the females.

The infants were dependent far longer than their primate ancestors. This was another force leading to increased social cooperation. Bohannon speculates that the primary source of language was the interaction of mother and infant, because they spent so much time together. Eventually we became Human, and as Graeber and Wengrow put it: we began doing human things.

Some evidence

There are a number o papers showing that there are regions in primate brains that are specific to facial recognition. There other papers  showing that primates make and recognize some facial expressions. Another group says that the parts of the brain responsible for speech are separate from the parts that perform thinking operations.

1. Facial-recognition regions. In this article from Scientific American, Doris Y. Tsao, a professor at Berkeley, explains how she and her colleagues discovered specific regions in the brain whose function is to recognize faces.  She performed fMRI studies on monkeys, creatures with whom we share a common ancestor. When fellow scientists objected that fMRI is inconclusive, she and her colleagues tested individual neurons in the patches, and found that all but a tiny number of cells in those patches responded solely to faces.

2. Primates recognize individual faces of conspecifics (members of their species) and some recpgmize human faces. They also read at least a few emotions from the facial expressions of conspecifics. A example is the teeth-bared grimace, which has different meanings in different species. It is common among chimpanzees, monkeys of many species, and in some canids. The teeth-bared grimace can look somewhat like the human smile. It is used in several papers I read as an example of the evolutionary roots of human facial expressions. Here’s one example from 2001. From the introduction:

One of the central questions in human evolution is the origin of human sociality and ultimately, human culture. In the search for the origin of social intelligence in humans, much attention is focused on the evolution of the brain and consciousness. Many aspects of human cognition and behavior are best explained with reference to millions of years of evolution in a social context Human brainpower can thus be explained, in part, by increasing social demands over the course of human prehistory. Cites omitted.

3. We do not need words to think. This was news to me, because I have a bare acquaintance with the fundamental ideas of Noam Chomsky. But this article in Scientific American asserts that the regions of the brain used in problem-solving are separate from the centers used in language.  The paper surveys dozens of studies. It finds several kinds of evidence.

First, there are studies of thinking in aphasic people. These are people who cannot use language, but nevertheless are able to solve problems, make plans, read faces and perform other tasks requiring mental processing.

Second, there are many fMRI studies showing that when people are solving problems, like doing Sudoku, the speech centers are not active.

Third, language is optimized for communication, not for thinking. There are ambiguities in words and sentence structures that would make problems solving fuzzy.

The areas of the brain that do language are late developments. We didn’t need complex language to survive. We could learn the techniques for knapping rocks into tools by watching and practicing. But the more we learn, the more we need language to share knowledge. If we think of knowledge as an internal state of mind, we can see language as a way to communicate that knowledge, that internal state, to others.

It seems me that each of these supports the idea that human evolution is oriented towards social cooperation. Our survival as a species has been built around our ability to work together to survive together. For us, evolution isn’t driven by the survival of an individual, but by the survival of our group. Our genes aren’t just ours, we share many of them with others in our kinship group. For most of our evolutionary history, kinship was at the root of our social groups. At least I think that’s probably so. Thus, if our cousins survive, many of our genes go with them.

But cooperation isn’t the only mode of interaction. All of our abilities can be used for more than one purpose. For example, our social skills can be used to deceive others. That’s always been true, and some of our primate relatives can do it too. We should assume that our earliest ancestors could and did take advantage of those skills and use them for individual gain. And we should assume that societies develop systems for coping with those non-cooperative behaviors. I think deception developed side by side with our social skills, and may have driven our social evolution to some extent.

But I think that at bottom, cooperation is a fundamental aspect of our selves, and that the capacity to deceive is a variant of cooperation skills. I think our first social control systems developed out of cooperation in reaction to those who refused to cooperate. Is that too optimistic?

Implications

This story is the opposite of the dominant theory of our times, neoliberalism. Our society tells us that we are nothing more than isolated individuals competing in a fiercely competitive arena for the resources we need to survive. Neoliberalism is at the heart of US capitalism, the economic system established by the rich and powerful. Many of our own ancestors fought back against aggressive capitalists, but were crushed again and again by a combination of state and federal armed forces, and private armies.

Of course, we don’t teach that history any more, but you can get a start reading A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn. We occasionally remember that Black people resisted, sometimes violently, but we never talk about the coal miners, the factory workers, and small farmers resisting the grotesque demands of the filthy rich. These men and women fought together. I mean literal fighting, with guns and pitchforks. Eventually they won minimal legal protection.

Then their children threw it away. They bought into a story about Lone Rangers and Honest Sheriffs and Invisible Hands.

These are people who don’t know their own history. Maybe we need to teach them their about their ancestors. All of their ancestors.

 

 

Coming To Grips With Free Will

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Index to posts in this series

Agency

Michael Tomasello didn’t write about the evolution of free will. His book is called The Evolution Of Agency. Even so, I think we should understand Tomasello’s model as a partial defense of free will.

The idea behind the book is that the psychological processes that characterize our species are the result of evolution and evolutionary pressures. That includes agency. Recall from this post that Tomasello gives this description of agency:

…[I]n the current case, we may say that agentive beings are distinguished from non-agentive beings … by a special type of behavioral organization. That behavioral organization is feedback control organization in which the individual directs its behavior toward goals—many or most of which are biologically evolved—controlling or even self-regulating the process through informed decision-making and behavioral self-monitoring. Species biology is supplemented by individual psychology. P. 2,

This description of what we mean by agency doesn’t explain how we set goals. But I think as a first approximation that we set goals “through informed decision-making and behavioral self-monitoring”, heavily influenced by our families and communities through what Tomasello calls socially normative agency. We examine as many aspects of our situation as we can think of and handle, we apply our decision-making tools, we decide. Among the constraints for decision-making we consider the incentives and constraints of our society.

Once our goals are set, we consider the ways we might reach them, and choose the one that seems most likely to enable us to reach the goal. We monitor our results, and make adjustment as we go along, including changing the method of reaching the goal, or the goal itself, if that seems better to us.

Determinists

Some scientists deny the existence of free will, including  Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist.  He explains why he thinks we have no free will in this LA Times interview about his recent book Determined.

Here’s an essay in The New Yorker by Nikhil Krishnan, a philosopher at Cambridge, discussing the book in the context of philosophy.  This article says that Sapolsky doesn’t define the term free will, but offers

a challenge. A man, Sapolsky invites us to imagine, “pulls the trigger of a gun.” That’s one description. Another is that “the muscles in his index finger contracted.” Why? “Because they were stimulated by a neuron,” which was in turn “stimulated by the neuron just upstream. . . . And so on.” Then he throws down the gauntlet: “Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will.”

First, how exactly would that kind of free will have evolved?

Second, that’s not how people think of free will. In normal usage free will is about the ability of the individual to make choices among alternatives, a view central to Tomasello’s model. I could shoot my gun, or I could not shoot my gun. Both are within the range of possible actions, and I can choose between them. Sapolsky thinks the fact that I don’t shoot is the result of every bit of experience in my past, and that I had no real choice. Someone else with a different past might not have any choice but to shoot. Tomasello, I think, would say that I can think rationally about whether or not to shoot the gun, examine the possible consequences, determine which action accomplishes my goals, and act on that reasoning

Examples

1. If someone had asked me 30 years ago what my favorite color is, I would not have had much of an answer. I might have said I don’t have one, or I might have said British Racing Green; or maybe blue, which is close to a non-answer. Today I would say jewel tones: ruby red, dark blue sapphire, intense emerald green. I can point to several reasons for this change. One is seeing the lapis lazuli blues of early Renaissance Sienese paintings of the Virgin Mary, and a ring we bought, gold with tiny sapphires.

2. Lake, a deeply conservative Trumpish Republican, attends a work-related dinner with their partner. Lake doesn’t know anything about the people at the table. The conversation turns to politics. Lake doesn’t want to impede their partner’s career, and keeps quiet.

3. Albert Einstein at the age of 16 imagines what he would see if he were riding side by side with a beam of light. A few years later he suddenly realizes the implications of the answer.

Analysis of examples

1. Favorite color doesn’t implicate goals. It seems to be about recognizing a thing that gives us pleasant feelings. The example asks if we can know whether a thing gives us pleasure, not whether we can choose what gives us pleasure.

It seems likely that we can train ourselves to take pleasure in things. I like opera, but that wasn’t always so. I learned to like opera by attending operas, listening to opera singers, and eventually singing opera chorus. How exactly does that relate to free will? Would Sapolsky say I had no choice in the matter?

2. This example seems fairly close to the foraging examples used by Tomasello, including the ones about our early modern human ancestors. Each person in the group has to play a role. Lake’s role is not to irritate the other people at the table and hurt Lake’s partner’s ability to bring home the bacon. Was that an exercise of free will by Lake?

3. I chose the Einstein example because I’ve always thought it was a singular insight into an otherwise intractable problem. The greatest works of art, music, literature and inquiry also show us a singular insight into our world, other people, and ourselves.

This example seems to combine elements of the first two. Why was Einstein thinking about this bizarre hypothetical at age 16? How much of the solution he eventually reached depended on the fact that other people were thinking about and working on that problem? Would Sapolsky agree that this is so far outside normal human behavior that it qualifies as free will? Is the concept of free will relevant to this example?

Conclusion

Of course, there isn’t an answer to this disagreement, so here’s what I think. Our bodies, including our cognitive processes and our psychological processes, co-evolved in a way that encouraged collaboration as a survival tactic. We learned to cooperate in gathering food, making simple tools and clothing, and protecting the group. It turns out that the cognitive and psychological processes we evolved are useful for other things, like making music, decorating plates and bowls, and inventing airplanes. They can be used for darker purposes. They can be used for highly abstract purposes, like set theory and surreal poetry.

We can also act rationally, just like Einstein thinking about the nature of light. We can force ourselves to examine as best we can the likely outcomes of our actions. We can use that skill to decide what we want and how best to get it. We can choose to act on the results of that rational thought or not. That’s enough free will for me.

Socially Normative Agency And Rights

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Index to posts in this series

Michael Tomasello’s book, The Evolution Of Agency, presents a model of the evolution of agency, not cognition, not emotion, not the physique or eating habits of Homo sapiens. It’s packed with references to academic papers and books, but in the end, it has to be understood as a series of hypotheses generated by Tomasello from his own research, and his extensive study in this area.

Any extension of this model, for example, trying to use it to understand our own culture, is mere speculation until it is tested. That’s true no matter how obvious the extrapolation might seem. With that caveat I’ve been thinking about the implications of this model.

Self-awareness

Here’s an example of Tomasello’s understanding of human agency as an individual attribute:

Most of the unique psychological capacities of the human species result, in one way or another, from adaptations geared for participation in either a joint or a collective agency. Through participation in such agencies, humans evolved special skills for (i) mentally coordinating with others in the context of shared activities, leading to perspectival and recursive, and ultimately objective, cognitive representations; and (ii) relating to others cooperatively within those same activities, leading to normative values of the objectively right and wrong ways to do things. Individuals who self-regulate their thoughts and actions using “objective” normative standards are thereby normative agents, very likely characterized by a new form of socially perspectivized consciousness, what we might call self-consciousness. P. 117.

In this picture, we evolved to cooperate. One crucial focus of cooperation is forming a useful picture of reality, one that we can use safely to plan our actions.

Side effects of socially normative agency

Tomasello’s evolutionary history leaves off around perhaps 50,000 or so years ago, when humans lived in small bands, loosely connected in cultural groups. That mode of life continued until about 6,000 years ago, when humans began to live in cities.

In The Dawn Of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow look at this history of our ancestors from a different perspective. I really like two of their ideas.

  • “… As soon as we became humans, we started doing human things.” P. 83.
  • “There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much.” P. 279.

Following these points out, most of the rules of cultural normativity must have seemed critical for survival ti early modern humans, even if the connection didn’t seem obvious to a child or an adolescent, or an outsider. But as the millennia pass, some of the norms might have seemed wrong or unnecessary, and oppressive. The young might have been unwilling to put up with the demands of their elders and especially their parents but lacked the ability to change things.

This is the Wikipedia summary of Sigmund Freud’s book Civilization and Its Discontents:

… Freud theorized the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual; his theory is grounded in the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are immutable. The primary tension originates from an individual attempting to find instinctive freedom, and civilization’s contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts. Freud states that when any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it creates a feeling of mild resentment as it clashes with the reality principle.

Primitive instincts—for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification—are harmful to the collective wellbeing of a human community. Laws that prohibit violence, murder, rape and adultery were developed over the course of history as a result of recognition of their harm, implementing severe punishments if their rules are broken. This process, argued Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that gives rise to perpetual feelings of discontent among individuals, justifying neither the individual nor civilization. Fn omitted.//

We don’t talk about instincts much anymor, and the question of mutability of instincts is open, but I think Freud has a sharp insight here. We all have moments when we feel out of control with rage or grief or hatred or …. We might have fantasies about guillotines for particularly loathsome elites or having sex with a co-worker. But mostly we just get over it and move on.

Tomasello would attribute this to our socially normative agency, and that makes a lot of sense.

Here’s an example used by Tomasello. A hunting party from a band kills an antelope. There are three competing interests. First, the successful hunter needs to eat, and wants to get as much as possible. Second, the hunter has a normative duty to the rest of the hunting party to share. Third, the hunter and the rest of the hunting party have a normative duty to carry the kill back to the rest of the band for disposition as the band decides.

Bands and cultures survive because the hunters bring the food home. But each time, the individuals experience a conflict in that they are unable to satisfy their selfish desires.There must have been cheating. Sometimes an individual or a group must have defected. Defection too has survival value, at times more so than the survival value associated with membership in the band. But that may well have produced an equally unpleasant sensation for many, guilt.

We aren’t so evolved we’ve lost our urge to satisfy our personal desires, or our willingness to satisfy our personal urges if we can or provide for our families even at the expense of the community. Thus the incidence of violence and sexual adventures, and the negative feelings and damage that go with those events.

Rights as limits on the demands of one’s community

In the past several thousand years we humans have lived in large communities, from a few tens of thousands to over a billion. We’ve endured all kinds of governments, from more or less egalitarian consensus-driven groups to totalitarian dystopias. Freud’s insight, and those of Graeber and Wengrow, apply to all of them. There will always be a conflict in the minds of many of us between the demands of society and our personal desires.

The Founders said that the point of government was to protect the rights given to people by the Creator, but they were just as worried about the dangers of government. They said the just powers of the government derived from the consent of the governed, but they were just as worried about the dangers of oppression by the majority. The solution they adopted was government of limited powers and the Bill of Rights.

The hope was to balance the desires of the individual members of society against the need to maintain a community in which everyone can flourish.

The idea, in other words, is that rights set the boundaries of the demands society can make on us. those limits

Discussion

1. I like Tomasello’s suggestion that one feature of shared agennce is the construction of a onsensus picture of the reality confronting the group, so that sensible shared decisions can be made. This was doable 10,000 years ago, but in our radically different world it’s hard. We’ve replace full consensus with majority rule

2. We should think about their impact of rights on our society as a whole, more than the feelings of the individuals claiming rights. Let’s take guns as an example. What kind of society do gun rights advocate think we should have? Should people with the history of Zackey Rahimi be allowed to have guns? Should this decision be made by 5 unaccountable unconstrained members of SCOTUS?  Or should the majority decide based on their understanding of the nature of a good society?

Socially Normative Agency

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Index to posts in this series

In Chapter 6 of The Evolution Of Agency by Michael Tomasello we come to human beings. Tomasello says that we humans build on the agency of lizards, squirrels and great apes discussed in earlier posts.

Let’s start with an illustration. Occasionally a group of chimpanzees will hunt and kill monkeys. One chimpanzee will spot the opportunity and scream and start chasing it. Others join in the chase. If they kill the monkey they all try to grab as much as possible. They do not distinguish between those that hunted and free-riders. Only the strongest and wiliest eat.

On the other hand, children as young as three years old act differently. Confronted with a task that requires two actors, they will form an agreement to work together. If they succeed at the task, they split the reward evenly almost always. If one defects from the work or tries to grab the whole reward, the other complains and that is usually enough to bring the offender into compliance. Children who don’t participate in the work are rarely given a share of the reward.

Tomasello says this is a form of agency in humans not present in other species. He calls it socially normative agency.

Evolution of socially normative agency

Tomasello says that hominids, the predecessors of our species, split off from the great apes about six million years ago. They began hunting collaboratively about one million years ago. He suggests that collaboration might have begun with scavenging meat off carcasses. Hominids were smaller and weaker than other species competing for the carcass. They would have had a better chance of success if they worked together, some keeping other scavengers away and some gathering the spoils, then splitting it up among all of the group.

Later, two of our ancestors might agree to work together to hunt large game, agreement would be established, and the two would work together and share the rewards. Over time, collaborative hunting became necessary to meet the demands for food. By about 400,000 years ago collaborative hunting was an established practice. Our ancestors became interdependent, unable to survive on their own.

Psychological processes and feedback control mechanisms

Tomasello says the central mechanism of control in all species is the feedback loop. In the simple form, a lizard uses its perceptionto look for prey, moving on if there is none. In small mammals like squirrels, there is an additional level of psychological control, an executive tier, that enables the individual to keep track of its goals (foraging, burying nuts for the winter, staying ahead of predators etc. They can chanage their behavior if needed for safety or for a better chance of successful foraging. They can choose among alternative actions for reaching those goals.

In great apes, there is third tier, the reflective tier, that monitors the executive tier, and can interrupt the action of the individual to solve problems preventing the individual from reaching its goal, Doing this requires mental processes Tomasello calls rational because they are logically structured.

In the example of three-year olds cooperating in a task, the two reach agreement on joint action. That agreement creates a a new entity, the joint agency. There feedback control mechanism runs  each child to the other. Both are entitled to enforce the requirements of the joint agency. If one child stops working, leaves, or refuses to share, for example, the other remonstrates in normative terms. The other will say something like: we don’t do that, or you have to share, or that’s not fair. The offender recognizes that this is a legitimate complaint, and most ofteb changes behavior. Tomasello says this is because each child recognizes and accepts the demands of the joint agency and the right of each to enforce it.

In great apes, the feedback control mechanisms are internal to the individual. In socially normative agency, the feedback loop is in the “we” created by the agreement, and is exercised by both parties as the project proceeds. The feedback control also covers the efforts of the two to collaborate in the task.

Evolutionary changes

The evolution of agency in humans requires greatly increased complexity in the brain: more and better neurons with more and better connections, and a large increase in the pre-frontal cortex, which we think is the location of executive action.

These physical changes were needed for collaboration. Control by agreed normative rules required three new kinds of psychological processes: a) creation of the joint goal: b) allocation of roles; and c) collaboration in self-regulation during the action. Each of these in turn require a chunk of mental processing, This is something humans do automatically, and other creatures don’t.

Those who didn’t cooperate, who didn’t communicate, and who didn’t share were left behind, without mates, and without offspring. The mental processes that enable collaboration, including collaboration, became targets of natural selection, probably in a form of co-evolution.

Cultural groups differentiated by their norms

Collaborative hunting and reward sharing was very successful for our ancestors. By about 150,000 years ago, human population had grown to the point that we began to live in larger and larger groups. Successful hunting of larger game was just one part of survival. Others in the group foraged for plants and small game, some became adept at creating tools snd weapons, others at weaving and making clothes, others learned about curative herbs and healing and so on.

Tomassello says that our ancestors were living in bands loosely connected to each other by cultural norms related to diet, stone knapping, languages, foraging techniques and more. Membership in a cultural group became necessary for survival as these cultural groups competed for resources. Again, those who couldn’t manage the psychological processes necessary for participation in the cultural group were shunned and didn’t reproduce. Compliance with cultural norms became a target of natural selection.

Cultural groups survived by teaching their offspring proper, that is normative, behaviors and techniques. Long childhoods and adolescence were periods of training and learning the social norms of the cultural group. In operation, these cultural groups made cpllective decisions, and enforced them. Tomasello calls this cultural agency. The feedback control is operated by the entire group.

Here’s how Tomasello describes the evolutionary process up to about 100,000 years ago:

… modern human brains are three times larger than those of other great apes, with an expanded prefrontal cortex (the main seat of executive functioning) and insula (the main seat of social emotions), and are structured by unique types of neurons with more complex dendritic structures Consistent with this analysis, González-Forero and Gardner … find that much of the brain growth characteristic of modern humans during this period was concerned with adaptations for cooperative interactions and cultural learning. P. 106-7; cites omitted.

Discussion

Regardless of your view of Tomasello’s model, one thing is clear from the evidence he cites. Human evolution runs side-by-side with increasing levels of cooperation. Our ancestors taught each other; we literally dragged ourselves up by our bootstraps. Social learning and cooperation are an integral part of our evolution.

In The Dawn Of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow discuss the Thomas Hobbes theory that early humans fought each other for resources, the war of all against all. That didn’t happen. We should stop talking like it did.

In the same way, the bizarre neoliberal idea that we humans are atomistic utility-maximizers struggling against each other to get all we can is madness. Any academic who takes this view should be laughed out of their profession.

I’ll have more to say about this in the next post.

 

Goal-Directed Agency and Intentional Agency

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Index to posts in this series

Lizards

Lizards are a representative of the first category of agency according to Michael Tomasello in his book The Evolution Of Agency. As with the other categories, Tomasello focuses on the way lizards forage for prey. C. elegant, the nematode we looked at in the last post, moves and food either does or doesn’t go into its mouth. That obviously won’t work for lizards. Most species survive largely on a diet of insects, small creatures that move and flit about unpredictably.

So lizards have a different strategy. They have a goal, finding food, but they have to do several things to reach that goal. They have leave their hiding places and move to a place where there are insects. They have to spot a specific insect and then catch it and eat it. At the same time, they have to make sure they don’t become prey for other creature.

Here’s a video of a guy feeding crickets to his pet crested lizard. The lizard is in a special feeding cage. The crickets must be alive or the lizard won’t eat them. Bonus: you learn a new term: gut-loading crickets.

Following Tomasello here’s how I read this video. The lizard stands still orienting itself to its surroundings. The guy throws a cricket into the cage. The lizard sees the cricket. It takes a few steps forward. It pauses. It charges and grabs it and eats it. The guy throws another cricket into the cage. The lizard sees it, turns to chase it, misses, and pursues it in short bursts. It catches and eats the cricket. The guy throws a bunch of crickets into the cage. The lizard singles out one, chases, catches and eats it. The other crickets run around. The lizard spots one, chases, catches and eats it. This is repeated.

In this video we see a frilled lizard, a native of Northern Australia and southern New Guinea. It’s about a meter in length, and weighs over a pound. This video is heavily edited but again following Tomasello, here’s how it can be read. The lizard descends from it’s hiding place in a tree. It forages for prey, meaning any insect it might find on the ground. It sees one, approaches, catches and eats it. While chewing it looks around. It spots a predator, a black-headed python. It’s frill blows up. The snake approaches. The lizard runs really fast (also amusing). It eventually runs up a tree, making a full escape.

Tomasello says that the lizard has hard-wired goals: including eating and avoiding predators. Both it’s prey and its predators are quick and unpredictable. It has evolved to deal with that unpredictability by paying attention to the crucial aspects of the situation it perceives at any moment. It then acts to achieve a goal applicable to that situation. In both videos, the lizard eats while checking the situation. In the second it detects danger. It freezes its eating, then flares its frill, then runs. It achieves its goals by a series of go-no go decisions. That’s a clear step up from C. Elegans.

Squirrels

Squirrels are Tomasello’s example of intentional agents. He gives an example of a squirrel on a tree branch spotting a nut on a lower branch. The problem is whether to jump to the lower limb or retreat to the trunk and run down to the lower branch. He says the squirrel looks at the nut then at the tree trunk and then back at the nut. He interprets this as the squirrel cognitively considering two alternatives, then forming an intention to act, then acting. This two step process is evidence of an executive tier of mental control of behavior.

I have a young cat who does something similar. Winston knows there is interesting stuff happening on the counter when I’m making coffee. I see him looking at me, then at the counter as if contemplating jumping up. Am I paying attention to him? If I say No in a loud voice, he won’t jump. Maybe. But if I do nothing or am not paying attention, he works out an answer and acts.

Winston also knows how to open a door. Here’s a video of cats opening doors. Note that in several of the scenes the cat stares at the handle before acting. Tomasello interprets this as the cat forming an intention and then acting on the intention. Again, that implies an executive tier of mental activity.

Here’s a video of squirrels hiding nuts. Nut-hiding is a hard-wired activity, but it’s a complex problem. The squirrel has to decide where to bury the nut, and it has to be able to find it in winter. There are other squirrels waiting to steal the nuts, and predators. There are obstacles, including roots and hard soil. The squirrels stop and look around several times. In each case it looks like the squirrel makes a choice.

This is a 20 minute video of a guy operating a squirrel maze in his back yard. It’s not exactly relevant, but it looks like the squirrels are playing, something we don’t see lizards do. Also I enjoyed it.

The difference

Tomasello says that when lizards perceive a change in the situation, they freeze their current behavior and then respond to the new situation. He contrasts this chain of go/no go decisions with

… an either-or process of decision-making in which the individual simultaneously considers more than one behavioral option simultaneously (which mammals arguably do….) Pp. 33-4.

Tomasello says squirrels and other small mammals have an executive tier in their psychological processes that controls their operating behaviors, like running and burying nuts. This is a function of their larger brains, especially a larger pre-frontal cortex, more complex neurons and neural connections, and increased memory. Larger brains and longer time spent as juveniles increase the possibility of learning about the environment and experimenting, including play, which we might see as rehearsal. Mammals seem to have whet we would call emotions that also provide input to the executive tier.

The executive tier of the squirrel brain coordinates all these inputs. It considers alternative courses of action, “weighs” the costs and anticipated benefits of each and chooses one. That choice is communicated to the operant systems. The executive tier monitors the outcomes. It can inhibit one choice in favor of another if the situation changes or if the initial choice meets an obstacle or fails. Small mammals don’t use words, so it does this with some from of remembered perception.

Here’s Tomasello’s version of an executive tier:

The executive tier oversees the operational tier, as it were, and attempts to facilitate behavioral decisions via action planning and cognitive control. … It requires individuals to cognitively simulate in an organized way their own potential actions, the potential obstacles and opportunities for those actions, and the probable outcomes of those actions. They do this by perceptually imagining all these action elements in the common cognitive workspace and representational format provided by an executive tier of operation. P. 49.

It is this executive tier that gives mammals a wider range of choices of action, which presumably increases the chances of survival of individuals.

Discussion

1. Tomasello says that there isn’t any way to find mental processes in brains, so scientists infer the mental processes from the overt behavior of the creature. I think this raises the potential of anthropomorphism, leading people to ascribe human characteristics to other kinds of creatures. The executive function in humans is a defining feature of our species, so this is a real possibility.Of course, here we’re talking about a simple form of executive control.

The videos seem to provide at least some reason to think Tomasello is on the right track in ascribing an executive tier to small mammals. The empirical studies he cites may also be persuasive evidence.

2. I have described only a small part of Chapters 3 and 4 for this post. It’s allfascinating, especially the discussion of the executive tier, but it’s not relevant to my purposes in reading this book. As a reminder, this series is aimed at thinking about the origins and roles of rights in our society. I’ll get there, I promise.

creative commons

Free Will, Agency, And Evolution

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Most of us think we have free will, and we certainly act as if we do. We expect ourselves to do certain things and not do other things, and we feel responsible for those choices. We have the feeling, the sense, that we control those behaviors, or at least that we have the ability to control decisions about which things we do and which we don’t. We attribute to other people their own agency, which we take to be just like ours, even if they may have different ideas about proper behavior.

There’s a school of thought that says we don’t control those things. Here’s a recent article about Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neurobiologist, who doesn’t agree. He’s not the only one. Perhaps recognizing that this is an intractable problem, many scientists use the term agency instead of free will.

One is Michael Tomasello, whose book, The Evolution of Agency, I’ll be examining in the next few posts. Agency carries less moral baggage, and it’s something that can be described and studied neutrally; at least more neutrally. Tomasello doesn’t give a precise definition of agency. This is from the introduction:

…[I]n the current case, we may say that agentive beings are distinguished from non-agentive beings … by a special type of behavioral organization. That behavioral organization is feedback control organization in which the individual directs its behavior toward goals—many or most of which are biologically evolved—controlling or even self-regulating the process through informed decision-making and behavioral self-monitoring. Species biology is supplemented by individual psychology. P. 2.

The book rests on two assumptions. The first is that the basis of agency is a feedback control activity, a psychological mechanism, seated in the brain. The second is that agency is an outcome of evolution.

Feedback control organization

Tomasello’s feedback control organization works like a thermostat. The idea is that a goal is set for the thermostat: keeping the temperature at a certain level. It has a sensor that measures the ambient temperature and compares it to the goal. It then turns on another device that brings the temperature closer to the goal. It continues to test the ambient temperature and when it reaches the goal, it turns off the device.

Tomasello claims that this is the only model that can work to enable things to control themselves. He points out that all efforts to get machines to operate autonomously work in accordance with this model.

Evolution and agency

Tomasello doesn’t think there’s a goal for evolution. He thinks that as brains become more complex, the feedback control activity takes on a different shape, a shape that takes advantage of the bigger brain. I’ll just toss in the observation that mutations happen all the time, and some become established in subpopulations whether or not they have any survival value. That might include hair color or a larger brain. If circumstances change, the mutation may suddenly have survival value, and the subpopulation thrives while the rest of the population suffers.

Studying psychological processes

Tomasello says agency is a psychological process, one that occurs in the brain of an individual creature. It cannot be studied directly. Instead scientists infer the existence of psychological processes from the overt behavior of subjects.

Scientists infer psychological agency when the organism acts flexibly toward its goal even in novel contexts. To behave in this flexible manner, the individual must go beyond a stimulus-driven, one-to-one mapping between perception and action. The individual must be capable of choosing to act or not to act, or among multiple possible actions, according to its continuous perceptual assessment of the situation as it unfolds over time (sometimes employing executive processes such as inhibition, as a further control process, during action execution). P. 27.

The layout of the book

Evolution has been at work on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. We say that different species split off from lines of evolution, as humans split off from the great apes; and as homo sapiens eventually split off from the first hominids, and then evolved into modern humans. The lines go back to the beginnings of life on the planet, to the earliest living creatures.

Tomasello thinks certain existing species have no agency, and the rest fall into four categories. He selects five of them to represent his five categories of agency.

1. No agency: C. elegans, a tiny worm-like creature (the image on the home page is a bunch of these creatures)
2. Goal-directed agency: lizards as representative of reptiles
3. Intentional agency: squirrels as representative of small mammals
4. Rational agency: great apes as representative of great apes
5. Socially normative agency, which has two subcategories
a) young human children as representative of hominids with a simple form of socially normative agency
B) adults humans who exhibit a more comprehensive socially normative agency

Tomasello treats each category of agency in its own chapter. The last chapter is mostly for his fellow scientists, discussing gaps in the research and proposals for future work on this model. In each chapter Tomasello explains how the agency works, the evolutionary pressures that might have led to it, and the nature of the world as perceived by the example creatures. These issues are supported by a empirical evidence from academic and field studies.

I’ll take a quick look at the first three levels of agency, and discuss socially normative agency in more detail.

Creatures without agency

Let’s start with C. elegans. This is a worm-like creature about 1 mm in length. We know a great deal about it: we have sequenced its genome; and identified its 302 neurons, their connections, and the role each plays. It has no sensory apparatus beyond the ability to sense nutritious and certain noxious substances. It lives in organic material, where it eats bacteria. It has rudimentary powers of movement. They are mostly hermaphrodites. For more, see this dense Wikipedia entry.

Basically it moves around in organic muck eating bacteria. If it isn’t finding any, it moves. If it detects a noxious substance it moves. That’s about it. Tomasello says that with the tiny number of neurons, it’s hard to imagine the creature could have a goal, let alone behave flexibly to achieve it. It is purely stimulus driven. It’s sensory apparatus is very simple, so it only recognizes a few stimuli, and it responds to them mechanically.

In Tomasello’s terms, this creature is non-agentive. He calls it an animate actor. There’s not much else to say about it.

Discussion

I’m not fond of the word “agentive”, which strikes me as an ugly neologism, but it points to somehting about human behavior. Not all of our behavior is agentive. Take breathing. We can control it, but mostly we don’t. It’s an interesting exercise to think about what parts of our actions are agentive.

Another way to put that is to ask how much we resemble C. elegans.