10 May 2008
Reviewing Reviewers--Kluge
)Published on May 10th, 2008 @ 02:03:35 pm, using 1269 words, 227 views
No one who has watched two family members disappear and die from Alzheimer’s can take seriously the advocates of “intelligent design,” Ben “Huge Movie Failure” Stein notwithstanding. Nothing says “cobbled together with duct tape, baling wire, and bubble gum” better than the human body. Except maybe the brain in that body. Which, ironically for Stein, if he weren’t so self-centeredly stupid that he can’t recognize it, is the best argument to be had against the too frequent and too unfortunate tendency of too many evolutionists to claim that we have optimized through mutation and selection. Most good evolutionists know that the process churns up options, some good, some bad, some mediocre, that have to find their way in the environments they’re given and that often change on them. Just because something survived (for now, anyway) doesn’t mean that was the BEST way to do it, just that it worked. And as mutations pop up in changing environments, that means that, yes, you can get some pretty impressive, maybe occasionally optimal results, but that you also end up with the duct tape, baling wire, and bubble gum.
Which is Gary Marcus’ point with his entertaining and enlightening book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. This review gets the major points right:
According to Marcus, while we once we used our brains simply to stay alive and procreate, the modern world and its technological advances have forced evolution to keep up by adapting ancient skills for modern uses–in effect simply placing our relatively new frontal lobes (the home of memory, language, speech and error recognition) on top of our more ancient hindbrain (in charge of survival, breathing, instinct and emotion.) It is Marcus’s hypothesis that evolution has resulted in a series of “good enough” but not ideal adaptations that allow us to be smart enough to invent quantum physics but not clever enough to remember where we put our wallet from one day to the next or to change our minds in the face of overwhelming evidence that our beliefs are wrong. “Evolution is conservative and stingy,” Marcus tells NEWSWEEK. “It uses what it has. It doesn’t start over–as a statistical matter, something is much more likely to evolve if it involves tinkering.”
A kluge (rhymes with “huge") is defined as a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem. Marcus’s finest example is the contraption used by the Apollo 13 astronauts to get home after their CO2 filters began to fail–using a plastic bag, cardboard box, some duct tape and a sock, they were able to cobble together a new filter and get home safely. Despite the fact that it worked, NASA has never been tempted to incorporate that design into its space projects.
In his attempt to define the “klugey-ness” of the human mind, Marcus would have us look no further than our memories, which he describes as “the mother of all kluges.” Unlike computers, we cannot readily recollect all that we’ve remembered. Turns out, our memory is driven by cues. We need hints and context to remember where we put our purse ("Retrace your steps"). To free associate from one memory to the next may, Marcus writes, “lead depressed people to seek out depressive activities, such as drinking or listening to songs of lost love, which presumably deepens the gloom as well.”
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Our older subconscious brain moves reflexively ("We’re hungry, eat that mushroom now"), while our newer prefrontal cortex struggles to catch up with other alternatives ("Check your guidebook to see if it’s poisonous or wait until we get to camp and eat some gorp"). Marcus theorizes that “the human tendency to most clearly remember information that seems consistent with our beliefs [or emotions] makes it very hard to let those beliefs go.” So the next time you get into an argument with your spouse and he or she snaps, “You only hear what you want to hear,” you can reply, “We all do. We’ve evolved that way.”
But before you despair that humans are doomed to a life of lost keys, irrational beliefs and false memories, Marcus does supply us with a whole host of ways to trains our brains to act more rationally. My personal favorite is his first, “Whenever possible, consider alternative hypotheses.” He recommends forcing yourself to come up with a list of alternatives even if you are absolutely certain that your husband is breaking drinking glasses out of spite and not because the sink is a little too deep for its intended purposes. Some of his other tips also involve forcing your brain to get out of the habit of relying on its more instinctual (and less reliable) thought processes and practice using our more conscious frontal lobes. This kind of advice may seem obvious when you read them but try and think about the last time you actually took advice such as, “Whenever possible, don’t make important decisions when you are tired or have other things on your mind.” Or “Always weigh benefits against costs.”
Or, if you want a short version straight from the author’s suboptimized mouth, try this brief presentation:
. . . As Charles Darwin observed, evolution invariably proceeds through a process called “descent with modification.” In lay language, this means that Mother Nature never starts from scratch, no matter how useful an overhaul might be. Everything that evolves necessarily builds on that which came before. Our arms, to take one simple example, are adaptations of the front legs of our primate ancestors.
In practical terms, that means that evolution’s products aren’t always particularly sound. Truly dismal solutions are quickly weeded out; if someone has a genetic condition that brings them into the world without a functioning heart, they don’t live long enough to reproduce. But merely adequate solutions (what engineers call “kluges") – like the awkward, injury-prone human spine, good enough but far from perfect – can stick around indefinitely if better solutions are too far away on the evolutionary landscape.
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Still, all is not lost. Even though our short-term desires are pretty good at grabbing the steering wheel of our consciousness, our more recently evolved deliberate minds are powerful enough to regain at least some measure of control.
Consider, for example, the difficulty that most people having in sticking to abstract goals like “I intend to lose weight” or “I plan to finish this article before the deadline.” Nice thoughts, but not formulated in terms that your ancestral, reflexive brain might understand. The work-around? Translate those abstract goals into a form your ancestral systems – which traffic largely in dumb reflexes – can understand: if-then. If you find yourself in a particular situation, then take a specific action: “If I see French fries, then I will avoid them.” As Peter Gollwitzer, my colleague in New York University’s department of psychology, has shown, even simple changes like these can markedly increase the chances of success.
Our conscious, deliberate systems will never have total control, and our memories will never be perfect, but as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, recognition is the first step. If we come to recognize our limitations, and how they evolved, we just might be able to outwit our inner kluge.
Gives you a very nice example of his engaging writing style as well, doesn’t it? The book will outrage the “humans are the sole reason the universe was created” crowd, just like all the arguments that have sent that belief crashing in recent centuries have. But for those who really want to understand how and why humans, maybe even themselves, work, this short and revealing book will keep your haphazardly constructed mind whirling for some time to come.
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