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Posted by plektix in Evolution on March 28th, 2010 | View Comments

I’m briefly coming up from the sea of thesis preparation (two weeks until defense!) to share this truly remarkable quote I just read:

Consider the following: in the evolutionary course there
have been a few great junctures, times of major evolutionary
advance. Their hallmark is the emergence of vast, qualitatively
new fields of evolutionary potential, and symbolic representation
tends to underlie such evolutionary eruptions. These “New
Worlds” can arise when some existing biological entity (system)
gains the capacity to represent itself (what it is and/or does) in
some symbolic form. The resulting world of symbols then
becomes a vast and qualitatively new phase space for evolution
to explore and expand. The invention of human language is one
such juncture. It has set Homo sapiens entirely apart from its
(otherwise very close) primate relatives and is bringing forth a
new level of biological organization. The most important of these
junctures, however, was the development of translation, whereby
nucleic acid sequences became symbolically representable in an
amino acid “language,” and an ancient “RNA-world” gave way
to one dominated by protein.

-from Carl R. Woese, “On the Evolution of Cells”, PNAS, 2002.

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Rafe Furst

Yes, the quote is well put. Visually speaking this is represented in Alex Ryan's diagram:

http://emergentfool.com/2007/12/05/alex-ryans-diagram/

To understand, substitute "Symbolic representation" for the words "Self referential" in the downward curved arrow.

"emergence of vast, qualitatively new fields of evolutionary potential" is the emergence of Level 2 from Level 2.

While Woese clearly understands all this, like most life sciences people, he fails to make a hard distinction between Evolution (horizontal axis) and Emergence (vertical axis). These are not truly orthogonal (as the cartesian graph metaphor would suggest they are) but it's important to understand the difference between the chicken and the egg, even if you know that in some important sense they are the same thing.
Alex Golubev

Rafe, can you or Alex Ryan provide some verbiage to go along with the picture, please? I definitely seems to capture quite a lot, but it would be great to go from just getting a sense of what it's representing to a more detailed description tracing each step and implications.
Alex Golubev

1. "symbolic representation tends to underlie such evolutionary eruptions"
2. "“New Worlds” can arise when some existing biological entity (system) gains the capacity to represent itself (what it is and/or does) in some symbolic form"

Lately i've been thinking of myself a whole lot less as a biological being vs a product of culture. I may die like an animal, but i live more like a pool of memes, which live and die at a much faster rate.

I guess the question is "what is more abstract than mental effort or say light?". The more "experiments" you can run in your head without actually dying or using more expensive forms of existence, the more godlike you become. Symbolic representation does seem to be the culmination of order out of non-order. Calling a singular something "one" and differentiating it from "not one" (0) is similar to having a feeling or understanding of something and putting it in words. It's a shadow world of abstraction, where experimentation by whoever is doing the conceptualizing is "cheaper" and not only that, the concept is then used to build a more complex structure.

This is all very vague and ambiguous, but no less than McLuhan's ideas. I'm just scratching the surface - i'm literally only a few hours into him, but I already think he has a better understanding of human evolution and life itself than anyone I've come across.

Honestly, i don't quite get what the Middle Age/Renaissance quote means in all its glory. All i know is that it's valuable and i hope to understand it better after researching McLuhan's writing more.
plektix

“The process of technological evolution culminates with the ability to achieve all the material values technologically possible and desirable by mental effort”

Hmmm, it's hard for me think of technological evolution "culminating" anywhere, any more than I could think of art, literature, or science culminating. I believe these will all continue to evolve as long as humans are around.

“McLuhan suggests that the Middle Ages, for instance, was characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and language. Modern life is characterized by the reemergence of grammar as its most salient feature—a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis”

Interesting, so a re-emphasis on rhetoric and language lead to an explosion in the humanities, and then to one in the sciences as well? Or was the benefit to science direct?
Alex Golubev

Fascinating. I was actually exploring in a related area myself the last couple of days. Here are a few gems (McLuhan wiki mostly):

"The process of technological evolution culminates with the ability to achieve all the material values technologically possible and desirable by mental effort" - Technological Evoluion on wikipedia

Tools -> Machine -> Automation

"McLuhan suggests that the Middle Ages, for instance, was characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and language. Modern life is characterized by the reemergence of grammar as its most salient feature—a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis"

"In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan also rehashed the argument—which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's The Gutenberg Galaxy—that media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.
Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century", brought on by the bardabilities of radio, movies and television.""