POETICKS

At this stage of the evolution of intelligence a lot of minor advances would be made: multiplication of reflexes, the addition of sensors sensitive to the absence of a stimulus, the combining of more sensors and effectors so, perhaps, a purple cell with white dots and smell B and a long flagellum will be pursued if the temperature of the water is over eighty degrees but not if it is under.

By this time, something of central importance had to have happened, or be ready to happen: the evolution of sensors sensitive to pain and pleasure. For that to happen, “endo-sensors” (sensors sensitive to external stimuli) would have to have broken free of the cell membrane to become potential “intra-sensors.” And somehow become sensitive to a chemical due to damage to the cell mem- brane–probably excessive water (a biochemist would know). Or maybe the infra-cell might become sensitive to pieces of the membrane which it would never have contact with unless the membrane were damaged. If the intra-sensor were attached to an away-from effector, natural selection would select it because of its value in helping its cell get away from whatever had damaged is membrane.

Eventually similar intra-sensors connected to toward effectors would become sensitive to some by-product, say, of a successful hunt–something eaten but not digested, that would cause the cell to pursue whatever it had gotten a good taste of. I’m now going to name all such components of a cell that carry out functions like those of the sensors and effector “infra-cells” to make discussion easier. Let me add the clarification that the connections between sensors and effectors may begin as physical channels but will soon almost surely come to be made by precursors of neuro-transmitters: i.e., a sensor with “connect” to its effector by a distinctive chemical that only the effector recognizes and is activated by.  The cell’s cytoplasm will act as a primitive synapse.

Various other “neurophysiological” improvements should soon also occur. One would be an intra-sensor’s gaining the ability to activate a toward effector when it senses pleasure but activate an away-from effector when it senses pain. The accident resulting in such an infra-cell would not be too unlikely, it seems to me: simply the fusion of two cells, one sensitive to pain and connected to an away-from effector, the other sensitive to pleasure and connected to a toward effector. Obviously an evolutionary improvement.

It also seems likely to me that intra-sensors would evolve sensitive to the activation of effectors. They would connect to other infra- cells carrying out reactions to, say, a successful capture of prey: a toward effector becomes active due to signals from a sensor sensitive to a certain kind of prey, in which case the outcome should be dinner, so a sensor sensitive to the effector’s activation which is connected to some infra-cell responsible for emitting digestive juices or the like, would be an advantage.

Certain other infra-cells should evolve to allow the step up to memory, but right now I can’t figure out what they might be, so will stop here, for now.

Certain cranks are questioning the possibility that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him on the grounds that he could not have gotten the 10,000 hours of practice at his craft Malcolm Gladwell says every genius needs.  What I want to know is, if Shakespeare had his ten thousand hours when he wrote the Henry VI trilogy, where does it show?  There are serious scholars out there who think Heminges and Condell were lying when they said he wrote them.  Many mainstream critics won’t accept that he wrote certain scenes in them.

I claim that any reasonably intelligent non-genius actor of the time could have used the historians of the time, as Shakespeare did, to have written them.  Add, perhaps, a cleverness with language that some 14-year-olds have.  The only way his histories improved after the trilogy was in the author’s becoming better with words, through practice, of course, but only what he would have gotten from contin- uing to write plays (and doctor plays and–most important–THINK about plays), and getting interested enough in a few of his stereotypical characters to archetize them as he did Falstaff.

It seems to me that the requirements for being a playwright are (1) a simple exposure to plays to teach one what they are; (2) the general knowledge of the world that everyone automatically gets simply by living; (3) the facility with the language that everyone gets automa- tically from simply using them all one’s life.  The rank one as a playwight will depend entirely on his inborn ability to use language, and his inborn ability to empathize with others, and himself.  Of course, the more plays he writes, the better playwright he’ll be, but I’m speaking of people who have chosen to make playwriting their vocation (because they were designed to do something of the sort).

I speak out of a life devoted to writing and having read biographies of dozens of writers.  I would never be able to agree that I’m wrong on this.

A week or so ago, I read an article in Discover about the shrinkage of the human brain over the past 20,000 or more years.  Well-written, fairly interesting piece thought didn’t go very deep because only certified authorities were consulted for explanations as to what was behind the shrinkage.  I was provoked enough to scribble a list of eight possible reasons for the shrinkage, planning an essay on the subject, for the heck of it mainly, but also to send to the author of the Discover article in hopes she might find it interesting, and perhaps do another article on the subject for some other magazine, and this time mention me.  Or think enough of what I wrote to get my views when doing another article on the brain.  Yeah, more delusional day- dreaming on my part.  But just to write an essay on the shrinkage seemed to me a good idea.  Another achievement, if I finished it, and a chance to clarify my thinking about my knowlecular psychology, too.  Also perhaps enough fun to break me out of the dry spell I’ve been going through as a writer.

This it did, for a day, for I wrote 1150 words the day I wrote the above. After that, I wrote a few hundred words about it daily for a few days, then missed a day.  That was okay with me because the reason I slowed down, then wrote nothing was that I thought I needed to back way up and explain intelligence, starting with its evolution.  A tough job even if I could remember as much of my theory as I needed to.

After a day or two of inactivity, I managed a few words a day four a couple of days.  They were of much value but they did start awakening my understanding of my theory. Eventually, I got the beginnings of my take on the beginnings of intelligence, if by intelligence we mean “choice of behavior” as opposed to random activity.

Let’s begin with the first living cell, a protozoan.”  It moves randomly through water.  Eventually it accidently acquires a sensitivity to light, let’s say, although it could be salt denisity or temperature, it doesn’t matter.  So, it has the prototype of a nervous system, a single sensor sensitive to light.  The next consequential accident will be its evolving a component that makes it move in some direction as opposed to being moved by environmental forces.  Call it an “effector.”  It may evolve this before it evolves a sensor, it doesn’t matter, What matters is that eventually many protoazoa will have non-functioning but not seriously biologically disadvantageous nervous-systems.  They’ll be superior (no quotation marks: they will have the potential for intelligence other protozoa lack, so will be superior to them, if not to invincibly egalitarians halfwits, whom I’m insulting here in the hopes they go away and I won’t have to hear the nonsense I eventually would if they didn’t).  Ergo, I will call them “alphzoa.”

The first key accident leading to intelligence will be an alphazoan’s forming a linkage forming its light-sensor and effector, allowing the former to activate the latter.

If the effector causes movement toward light, and light is beneficial–as perhaps a source of energy–alpazoa with this capacity will soon become dominant.  Alphazoa which light causes to move away from light will die out.  Or perhaps evolve differently, finding something in darkness that makes up for lack of light–concealment from prey, maybe.  In any case, a functional, useful nervous system will have come into being, or what I’d call simple reflexive intelligence.  The march to Us hath commenced. Eventually some sensor will evolve that is sensitive to the color, say, of one of the alphazoan’s prey and links with an effector causing the alphzoa to move toward the prey, a “toward-effector.”  Ditto, a reflex with an “away-from effector” attached to a sensor sensitive to the color or some other characteristic of some kind of predator on the alphazoan.  Not a technical advance, but certainly a big jump in improving the alphazoa’s biological fitness.

At the same tiime, alphazoas will naturally be increasing their numbers of such reflex pairs.  Eventually, there’d have to be a sizable group of alphazoa with several effective reflex pairs, to significantly improve their chances of those pairs lucking into new combinations of high importance. A good example would come about when an organism preying on the alphazoa evolved the same coloring as the alphazoa’s prey.  Misfits without the toward-gray reflex would suddenly have an advantage on those with it.  Some such misfits would develop withdraw-from-gray reflex pairs.  Eventually some of them would also develop a sensor sensitive to something the prey had that the predator did not have but the gray prey did, smell A, say, and connect it to the move-toward effector.

Conditions would then be right for the next essential evolutionary step toward full intelligence.  Alphazoa would exist, each of which has an away-from-grey reflex and a toward-smell A reflex.  So they would flee from gray cells without smell A–but both flee from and go after gray cells with smell A.  Safety, but no meal unless the prey swam into them.  This problem (or one like it) would be crucial in making conditions right for the advent of a rudimentary form of “choice,” however.

I’m sure messy partial solutions would come about and probably clever mechanisms different from the one I think may have carried the day.  But something along the lines of the solution I’m about to propose had to have occurred.  It would depend on the evolution of inhibitors–and we know inhibition has a major role in the nervous system.

An inhibitor is device which prevents any effector it is connected to from acting just the way a sensor causes the activation of any effector it is connected to,  Like everything else, it would pop up by chance but persist when it happened, say, to be connected to a smell-A sensor and inhibited an away-from effector.  Ergo, the alphazoa blessed with such an inhibitor would flee a gray cell which lacked smell A, but go after such a cell if it had smell A, because it sinhibitor would prevent the away-from effector from preventing it from doing that.

So, life will now have achieved the ability to choose between advancing or withdrawing in the direction of a gray cell.  It will still be a very primitive computer, but with something like intelligence, anyway.

***  That’s as far as my coherent writing got.  Extremely difficult to write although what I said  could probably not be more simple and unoriginal.

There have always been mediocrities who desperately want to believe that one can become great if only one applies oneself. Even more partial to the idea are totalitarians, who–if training is shown to be everything–will have a good chance of being allowed to totalitarianly force training on unfortunate children. Malcolm Gladwell is no doubt one of them. In his recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he argues that high achievement is only possible for grinds, and that there is no such thing as what he calls “an outlier,” an individual who rises to the top without being a grind. To support his view, he presents a study (by someone named Ericsson) of violin students at a Berlin musical academy, tracking them from age five to age twenty. All were gifted, all stayed with the violin for fifteen years. Here’s what Gladwell says of the study (which I got from a post to one of my Shakespeare Authorship Debate discussion groups, by a Marlovian):

A week of so ago, I read an article in Discover about the shrinkage of the human brain over the past 20,000 or more years.  Well-written, fairly interesting piece though it didn’t go very deep because only certified authorities were consulted for explanations as to what was behind the shrinkage.  I was provoked enough to scribble a list of eight possible reasons for the shrinkage, planning an essay on the subject, for the heck of it mainly, but also to send to the author of the Discover article in hopes she might find it interesting, and perhaps do another article on the subject for some other magazine, and this time mention me.  Or think enough of what I wrote to get my views when doing another article on the brain.

Yeah, more delusional day-dreaming on my part.  But just to write an essay on the shrinkage seemed to me a good idea.  Another achievement, if I finished it, and a chance to clarify my thinking about my knowlecular psychology, too.  Also perhaps enough fun to break me out of the dry spell I’ve been going through as a writer.

This it did, for a day, for I wrote 1150 words about it Friday.  Four or five hundred Saturday and another six hundred yesterday.yesterday.   In the process, though, I veered into the evolution of intelligence and suddenly have too many problems to solve. What I thought I’d do a short essay about needs a short book to do right.

Oddly enough, one of my larger problems is defining intelligence.  All I’m sure of is that it came long before brains evolved.  I think it may just be “the ability of an organism to choose reactions to a situation based on more than one piece of knowledge.  Presence of predator equals flee would be pre-intelligence, or a reflex action.  Presence of predator when one has a spear equals destroy equals intelligence.  Even though in the final analysis all our behavior is reflexive.  It’s just that some behavior’s stimulus is both temporally and spatially larger than another’s.