When I was a girl in Lutheran Sunday school, I had a difficult time understanding certain biblical characters. Why was I supposed to root for Jacob, who cheats his older brother Esau out of his birthright? Was I supposed to applaud the way Jacob and his mother colluded to trick the boys’ old blind father? Why wasn’t Jacob condemned in the story? Why did he win? Why was his cheating celebrated? When I questioned my teachers about this odd state of affairs, they inevitably looked embarrassed, muttered something wholly unsatisfying to me, and went on with their classes.
Years later, I came to understand that a simple principle of vivacity might be at work. The clever, wily boy who wins the game is a beloved character, and he has a long history. Odysseus and Sinbad are irresistible survivors. Today people rush out to buy memoirs written by people who were beaten by their parents or kidnapped by maniacs or succumbed to heroin addiction or fell ill with cancer or were lured into cults but triumphed over the bad and brutal in the end by sheer willpower. Dawkins’s gene may be selfish and to some degree deterministic, but when the molecule is personified, that selfishness has the admirable appearance of many a clever, heroic figure. Despite Schopenhauer’s gloomy view of humanity in general and his virulent misogyny, his ruthless will has oomph, as does Nietzsche’s later will to power. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Defoe’s Moll Flanders are female examples of champion survivors. Jane Eyre is a later incarnation of the tough orphan who perseveres and wins in the end. In the United States, popular culture has raised the male version of this character to dramatic heights. The capitalist hero, hoisted up by his proverbial bootstraps, aggressive, selfish, but oh so clever and rich, is a winner admired by many. The late Steve Jobs of the Apple computer company is a recent example. Not a nice fellow by all accounts, but then “nice guys finish last”—to draw from the seemingly endless well of clichés on the subject.
My point here is that Dawkins’s personified gene fits an old type. I am well aware that the zoologist later rethought his adjective “selfish,” that his view of genes is not a wholly deterministic one, and that he admits in his preface to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of the book that he had not thought carefully enough about “ ‘vehicles’ (usually organisms) and the ‘replicators’ that ride inside them.”181 He also popularized the idea of memes, traveling idea bits that spread in the culture from one person to another. None of this, however, alters his essential tale of a robot waltzing, running, or just walking along the highway of life with a gene at the controls. I am posing the question again: Aside from the obvious truth that there is hereditary material in organisms, why is the metaphor of a human being as a programmed robot vehicle seductive to so many?
In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Dawkins reveals his foundational assumptions. In the blunt form typical of him, he writes, “If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”182 This often-quoted sentence could never have belonged to Darwin, not only because the father of evolution could not have understood information technology in the way Dawkins does, but because he did not characterize natural processes in mechanistic terms. But what exactly are Dawkins’s vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes? I couldn’t help thinking of familiar images from science fiction movies, in which bubbling, brilliantly colored concoctions are intended to depict life being created artificially. Is Dawkins referring here to biology in general? Are these vibrant throbbing gels and oozes shorthand for our bones and tissues and blood and organs, our cellular makeup? Or is this throbbing gel, as I suspect, an embryo encased in the uterus, what we think of as life’s beginning? Is he telling his reader, if you believe life begins as a yucky, messy, slimy, wet business inside a woman’s body, think again? Or is this a latter-day version of the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter?
In one of the essays collected in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, Steven Pinker approvingly quotes Dawkins’s sentence about gels and oozes and explains why conceptualizing the question of life in terms of information is superior to discussions of the workings of actual molecules:
Dawkins’ emphasis on the ethereal commodity called “information” in an age of biology dominated by the concrete molecular mechanisms is another courageous stance. There is no contradiction, of course, between a system being understood in terms of its information content and it being understood in terms of its material substrate. But when it comes down to the deepest understanding of what life is, how it works, and what forms it is likely to take elsewhere in the universe, Dawkins implies that it is abstract conceptions of information, computation, and feedback, and not nucleic acids, sugars, lipids, and proteins, that will lie at the route of the explanation.183
Notice Pinker admires Dawkins for his courage. He is a brave figure who courageously resists those biologists who resort to purely concrete descriptions of life. (Dawkins here becomes rather like his own description of the cowboy gene.) Nevertheless, Pinker is invested in harmonious levels of description. He argues that the “ethereal commodity,” “information content,” is not in conflict with its “material substrate.” In this view, information is on top as a concept and matter lies below it as its substrate, the actual molecular material stuff. Information is an abstraction that covers the biological reality, which in a figurative sense lies somewhere underneath it but is not at odds with it. However, in the next sentence, the metaphor “deepest understanding” appears, which moves the reader from one hierarchy into another, effectively flipping what is on top and putting it on the bottom. Now information, computation, and feedback occupy the depths of true knowledge, not the gels and oozes that may appear under the biologist’s microscope. Why? Because life may not be like that elsewhere in the universe, but information processing and computation will as they are embedded in the very nature of the physical universe. Information is at once superior to and deeper than biology because it can encompass other life-forms on other planets that may indeed exist somewhere. Information appears to be less like Aristotle’s form and more like Plato’s eternal idea.
When I first ran across claims like this one, which essentially argue that it is information pattern that defines life, not matter, that organization is what counts, not the material of which it is made, I was deeply puzzled. What does it really mean that information, computation, and feedback are more important than molecules, sugars, and lipids, not to speak of bone and muscle and flesh? Are these biological realities incidental to what we think of as life? What is “information” in this context? For the moment, it is enough to say that after much reading, it became clear to me that this “ethereal commodity” has become dogma, at least for some. The word “information” is ubiquitous, and we know it is a valuable commodity, but its meaning changes with use. What is it?
In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles asks, “When and where did information get constructed as a disembodied medium? How were researchers convinced that humans and machines are brothers under the skin?” By tracing the history of cybernetics and the interdisciplinary Macy conferences held between 1946 and 1953, Hayles argues that in the first conference Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon devised a theory of information that was at once dematerialized and decontextualized: “Shannon and Wiener defined information so that it would be calculated as the same value regardless of the contexts in which it was embedded, which is to say, they divorced it from meaning.”184 She further notes that not everyone at the conferences thought this was the best strategy.
Hayles is right that the word “information” took a new turn with Shannon and Wiener, but she does not say that there was a long precedent for what Shannon and Wiener did. Separating symbols from their meanings to find the essential patterns or laws of human reasoning is what logicians have been doing since the Greeks. Galileo and Descartes both sought abstract solutions to the secrets of nature and mind. In his 1847 The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, the innovative logician George Boole wrote, “They who are acquainted with the present state of the theory of Symbolic Algebra, are aware, that the validity of the processes of analysis does not depend upon the interpretation of the symbols which are employed, but solely on their laws of combination.”185 Boole was interested in not only advances in logic but uncovering the laws of the human mind. As the mathematician Keith Devlin explains in his book Goodbye, Descartes, “Since Boole, logicians have regularly exploited the possibility of working with ‘meaningless’ symbols. By stripping away the meaning, it is possible to ignore much of the complexity of the real world and concentrate on the pure, abstract patterns of logic.”186 Whitehead writes, “The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities.”187 These patterns are the “deep understanding” of existence. With such a theory, one can move easily from organic bodies to machines and back again. Information remains the same no matter what it is made of, and it is not dependent on its material, its context, or its meaning.
Norbert Wiener opens a chapter called “Organization as the Message” in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950) by confessing that what follows will contain an element of “phantasy.” Fiction and dream will invade his science just a bit. Wiener’s main point, which makes the familiar distinction between form and matter, however, is emphatic, and, by his lights, nonfantastic: “The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made.” It is the pattern or form that counts, he tells us, whether the form is organic or of some other material: “The individuality of a body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance.”188 He ends the chapter by arguing that the reason “we cannot telegraph the pattern of a man from one place to another” is “due to technical difficulties.” In other words, soon it will be possible to beam a man from one place to another. His essential point is that “traffic” in the modern world “is overwhelmingly not so much the transmission of human bodies as the transmission of human information.”189 One can certainly argue that Wiener’s statement was right then and is even more right now. We are drowning in information.
Wiener’s idea is at once simple and troubling. Information becomes wholly independent of its substance. It is the pattern, not the meaning, that counts. The word “information” may be the single most malleable word in contemporary culture. In 1984, A. M. Schrader published a work in which he found seven hundred definitions of “information science” between 1900 and 1981 and described the general state of affairs as one of “conceptual chaos.”190 Depending on what text you are reading, the word can mean, as it does for Wiener and Shannon, the pattern of communication between source and receiver. It can also mean the content of a so-called cognitive state, the meaning of a sentence in linguistics, or a concept in physics that in some way seems to have been naturalized. In this last definition, no eye or ear or body is needed to take in the information and understand it. It is present before any thinker came along. The very arrangement of atoms and molecules is information. In Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe, Tom Stonier writes, “Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist . . . It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists.”191 I confess I think that how one understands the word “information” must enter into this problem, and that without certain turns in the history of science and technology, it might not have occurred to anyone to speak of information as an inherent property of the material world, that such an understanding of “information” has a rhetorical history. There is no sense of language use in this statement. If one defines “information” as patterns of reality that have the potential to be read and interpreted, then the world is indeed plump with information of all kinds—both natural and unnatural.
Pinker states that his faith in information as the appropriate concept for “life” is also the appropriate concept for “mind.” The mind he is referring to emerged through what is now called the cognitive revolution in the 1950s. Without the cognitive revolution, there would be no evolutionary psychology, no claims that our minds are computers. From this point of view, thinking is computation, and minds are symbolic information-processing machines. Computers can therefore simulate our thought processes or disembodied patterns without any reference to particular gels and oozes—the biological material stuff underneath.
Rom Harré, the philosopher and psychologist, describes this way of thinking about cognition as essentially dualistic. “The way that the architects of the First Cognitive Revolution constrained their model of the human mind quickly developed into the analogy of the computer and the running of its programmes . . . As a psychology, this form of cognitivism had a number of disturbing aspects. It preserved a generally Cartesian picture of ‘the mind’ as some kind of diaphanous mechanism, a mechanism which operated upon such non-material stuff as ‘information.’ ”192 Darwin would have been surprised to find that after his death, his careful observations of plants and animals and his idea of natural selection would be yoked to machine computation, not to speak of Descartes’s schism between mind and body.