Whoops There Goes Another Rubber-Tree Plant -- Mike Siddall
Something I very much want to demonstrate with
this project is that it's possible to write an article
which doesn't require humour or personal anecdotes
to be a fascinating read. This article by Mike Siddall
takes an idea and explores it in a way that I wish
more fanwriting did.
The nice thing about biology, as one of my university tutors used to say, is that there are no Laws. Of course this is only partly true, living things are governed by the same laws as the rest of the universe; the Laws of Thermodynamics apply equally if you're a scaly, pincered invertebrate scuttling around a rock-pool, or the Crab Nebula. But, within their own order, organisms seem to resist being categorised or ordered with an almost wilful perversity.
Something as inflexible, as perfect, as Laws can't be worked out. So, even though they're often called Laws, what biology really has are Rules. The difference being that while rules state that something may be usually or almost always so, !t does not invariably or necessarily have to be that way. Rules allow for exceptions, and within the realm of life there are always exceptions. Some examples: 'Mammals suckle their young, and bear them alive', that's a Rule, exceptions would be the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteater. 'All living things use DNA to encode their genetic information', that's another Rule; the exception would be the RNA viruses. However, provided you accept their limitations, Rules can be very useful, and sometimes they throw up some interesting... symmetries.
For example, 'all animal societies are held together by lethal force, its use or threat'. Someone once did an experiment with bees in which he constructed a model bee in order to discover the finer points of the dance the workers use to tell each other where there's a rich pollen source. The interesting discovery he made was that if the model failed to move on from one phase of the dance to the next, the rest of the workers would become increasingly agitated and eventually they would try to kill the model. Failure to conform is met by destruction, how about that for symmetry? This sort of thing doesn't seem to be appreciated by whoever writes the voiceovers for wildlife documentaries, which I usually find sickeningly twee. You've all seen the sort of thing, a wolf-pack described as 'a model of co-operative behaviour' in which the members 'all peacefully combine to bring up their young'. The clear implication is that animals exist in some sort of natural Eden, and only Man is bad. When the pack comes back from the hunt it's certainly true that they regurgitate food for the cubs, and even play nice with them. But they do all this for a very good reason, the alpha pair are watching them like hawks. If they don't do these things they'll be driven out of the pack, !f they won't be driven they'll be killed. You can work out the symmetry for yourself but here's a clue, thank of the alpha pair as the Inland Revenue.
But the Rule that fascinates me isn't even really a Rule at all, it doesn't have a name or anything. Think of it as a guideline, or a way of looking at things. I call it Levels of Complexity, or !f you prefer, the complex-simple-complex rule.
Consider ants. Fascinating creatures I've always thought, and the subject of yet another of those tv cliches. The queen ant rules the colony, she sits in the middle and tells all the other ants what to do, right? Wrong. Oh, I'm not denying the queen controls the colony, but that's quite a different thing altogether from ruling it. The queen ant hasn't got enough brains to write an episode of Seaquest, let alone run something as complicated as an ant colony. Neither has any other ant, or all of them put together if it comes to that. But run it undoubtably does, so how do they manage !t? Well, this in where this complex-simple thing comes in.
An individual ant is certainly complex; she has specialised organs for all kinds of things, sensory, respiratory, you name it. All integrated into a functioning whole. So, if the individual is complex, and so is the colony, how do you get from one to the other? They do it by applying very simple rules, as they have to, for all it's complexity an ant isn't much more (when !t comes to actions) than a collection of reflexes. All these carefully evolved reflexes (you can call them pre-programmed responses to external stimuli if it makes you feel more scientific) act together to enable social insects to manipulate their environment with a high degree of efficiency, and the minimum of cognition. This last point is important, if they have to think about it then they can't do it. But because ants are capable of seemingly sophisticated behaviour, then this point is often missed. I feel an example coming on.
Army ants are well-known as being a kind of organic hoover, they go through the leaf-litter eating anything in their path, and nothing organic can stop them. This is not quite true, the one thing they will divert around are certain species of plant which have adopted other ants as guests. The distinguishing feature of these acacia ants (to use one species as an example) is their extreme aggressiveness. They don't have to look for food or excavate a nest, the plant provides all this, all they have to do is protect their host. They do this with great ferocity against any enemy, plant or animal; although small in number compared to the army ants, they would cause so many casualties before being overwhelmed that it's not worth the effort, so the army ants divert around them. You'd think that sort of behaviour would imply intelligence on the part of the army ants, wouldn't you? The scouts must spot the acacia and report back to the main column, where the decision would be taken to divert the march, implying a controlling intelligence. But that can't be. You'll have to take my word for it but ants can't tell one bug from another, they recognise their own sisters and everything else is food. What actually happens is simpler; the army sends out scouts who lay a scent trail for the main column. Any scouts who reach the acacia ant's perimeter get very swiftly chomped. The only scouts who survive to lay a trail are those who miss the perimeter entirely. So the whole column swings around the tree as smoothly as a Life Guards manoeuvre, and all without consultations or back-referrals, it's all completely automatic.
There are endless examples from the ant world which, should you fail to buy me a drink next time we meet, I could fascinate you into catatonia with. But the general point is the same. An ant colony is the very by-word for efficiency, yet at an individual level 'efficiency' is to the average ant what the Gillette GII razor is to the average male sf fan. Your typical ant wanders around the colony like a drunken techie at a Dead Dog party until she blunders into a job that needs doing. When her, and her sisters', responses are correctly triggered they can construct something so marvellously intricate as to make the Enigma Variations look like the Bay City Rollers Shang-a-lang. And all from the simplest possible rules.
Anyway, enough of ants, let's move on. This levels of complexity idea applies in lots of areas if you look for it. Take babies; undeniably a baby's brain is very complex, in structure, in biochemistry, and in function, but what about its' mind? Doting parents aside, one of the first things to strike anyone who looks at a baby is how stupid they are. (The very first thing to strike you is the smell, but let's not get too lavatorial.) So how does the said child get to be the skilful, fascinating, enormously intelligent entity that, for example, you are? Well, you know what I'm going to say, simple rules, things that can be summed up in neat little phrases like 'accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative'. You've probably all seen the Horizon programme that illustrated this so well, but I'll briefly recap. A Baby's brain reinforces neural pathways that lead to successful action, and starve those that don't, but the raw material is purely random actions. Thus a child rapidly progresses from waving it's limbs about in a pathetically useless manner into the cunning little bitch who can take out an uncle's eyeball with just a negligently skilful flick of one wrist, (!f you'll forgive the interjection of the personal). The theory of what's going on is appropriately simple; baby waves its' arms randomly until they accidentally intercept whatever object it's trying to reach. This success leads to the brain registering pleasure, which then reinforces whichever sequence of (randomly selected) firing neurones produced the successful action. Thus, when baby next attempts to reach for an object that particular pattern is more likely to be selected. Obviously there's a lot of false starts and back-tracking needed for this to work, but any parent will tell you how amazingly swiftly the process can proceed once it really gets rolling.
Most of the purely physical skills we learn operate the same way. And it's just as well, since it leaves us plenty of spare capacity for genes to encode for the development of a brain capable of abstract thought. Animals, such as insects, which hatch with all their abilities formed by instinct are very limited that way, and it's probably the very paucity of such capabilities in human babies that enable the adult of the species to be so formidable. It also explains why complex robots are so incredibly difficult to construct. Show a robot a bowl of fruit and tell it to take the reddest apple and put it on a plate and it'll probably have a nervous breakdown. The robot would need precise instructions as to what was an apple (you try defining an apple in computer language), what was red, what was a plate, how hard to squeeze the apple, and a host of other parameters. whereas you could do it with scarcely a conscious thought.
Enough examples I hear you say, (well, to be accurate, I hear you groan), but don't worry I'm coming to the point. I started out by talking about symmetries, how biological rules seem to resonate throughout the living world. Well, if this complex-simple thing applies to all sorts of situations, then what about us? By 'us', I mean human societies.
Consider what human societies consist of, which is to say individual humans. Now I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned there is nothing in the known universe more intricate than me. I'm not being egotistical, I'm aware you could say the same about the rest of the human race. So, people are complex, and their societies are most certainly complex. Bit of an understatement that, in all of the natural world there is nothing as efficient, as powerful, as effective as what happens when a sufficient number of people work together. You see what I'm getting at don't you? What are the simple rules which make the whole thing work?
Some are obvious, thou shalt not kill, steal etc. Or the impulse to trade. But these don't interest me so much. For a start they're pretty much universal, it's too much like fish having no word for water, it doesn't really tell you anything. What I want to know about is what marks out one society from another. I have the feeling it's got to be something simple, and that if we knew what it was we could manipulate it, and then we could... we could do just about anything. We all want, or say we want, a society that provides the maximum of human liberty with the maximum of financial security, we want a progressive society with the minimum casualties of change. But do we have the faintest idea how to go about achieving it? We construct vast edifices of law and custom, we preach, analyse, and politicise, all to decide where we as a society are going. All this irritates me because it all ignores the fact that we don't have the faintest idea how we got here in the first place. Examples again; why did the Industrial Revolution start in Britain? Obvious question but you'll search in vain for a definitive answer; it was the decline of the divine right of kings, it was resource depletion, it was Huguenot refugees, it was the abolition of slavery, it was all of the above. Personally I like the divine right theory, because it's a simple answer, ("Who gives a shit what His Nibs says, let's build a steam engine!"), and all it requires is a change of attitude by enough people. But none of these factors are peculiar to that time and that place, so how come the outcome? Or take the religious revival of the Victorian era, consequence of Empire, or cause? Maybe these are bad examples, but what I'm trying to say is that we really have no idea why societies change, and yet we go on trying to engineer them from the top down, with free-market capitalism, or socialism, or welfarism, or any other 'ism' you care to think up. We go on thinking that populations respond only to environmental pressures despite all the evidence that homo sapiens is the species most capable of manipulating the environment right back at you. If you want to re-engineer a society maybe it can only be done from the bottom up, otherwise you could never predict the consequences. Take Prohibition, imposed from the top it brought not an increase in sobriety and good health, but instead it's only achievement was to make a lot of criminals rich, and make outlaws of most of the adult population. Contrast that with Temperance movements which are classically bottom-up in that they try to change people's behaviour by persuasion. Granted they're not very efficient but what they do achieve seems to be without the undesirable fallout that accompanies the other approach.
All this sounds like anarchist philosophy, which it's not meant to. Certainly some rules have to be set and enforced, I don't think I should be allowed to build a fast breeder reactor in my backyard just because I occasionally feel like nuking Esther Rantzen. It's just that, while governments may be vital to running a civilised society, they always cock it up when it comes to changing it, or even preserving the best of it.
Because they don't pay any attention to the simple things, and it the analogy I've been relentlessly hammering is true, then it's the simple things that matter. "Good manners don't cost nuffin." they say. Maybe the decline of manners is more damaging to the long-term health of a society than any amount of decline in Gross National Product. And when did you last see a politician with anything remotely approaching good manners? What I'm trying to say is that if you want to change the world you should start as simply as possible, a small change could be all it really needs. Why, just imagine if everybody read sf, can you conceive of how the world would be changed? …hmm, well maybe we're not quite ready for a world in which everyone is five years behind the fashion curve, and the height of fine art is the dragon poster. Still, the point remains. Make a tiny change, change everything.
What small changes? What are you asking me for? What the hell do you think the letter column is for you lazy buggers?
Whoops There Goes Another
Rubber-Tree Plant is reprinted from
Empties #16 -- Ed. Martin Tudor (1995)
and is © Mike Siddall