ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, LXXI.
Nul vent fait pour celuy qui n’a point de port destiné. Montaigne, Essais, livre II, chap. 1
He insisted on absolute clarity about the question we were asking in our research. I recall how shocked I was, on visiting our sister research group at Madingley in Cambridge, to hear one of the graduate students beginning to describe his research with the words: ‘What I do is . . .’ I had to restrain myself from imitating Niko [Tinbergen]’s voice: ‘Ja, ja, but what is your question?'
Richard Dawkins, An Appetite for Wonder: the maknig of a scientist (2013), ch. Learning the Trade
まったくの入門者ながらも、自分が進化生物学に興味をもつことになった始めの関心は、
- 概念 ideas は「進化する」といえるのだろうか ?
- (= evolutionary biology の考え方を 'biology 以外' -- たとえば、数学 -- に適用するのは、どれほど適切なことだといえるか ?)
ということだった。
とくに、本来からはなれた副-機能が選択の対象になりうるとする外適応 exaptation の考え方は、知識や道具のように、一見するとまったく生物学のではないものにまで適用しうると思った: もしこれが厳密に適切な応用だとしたら、命名者としての化石学者 Stephen Jay Gould 以外に、どれくらい多くの生物学者が似たことを考えているのだろう ?
☆ ☆ ☆
1965年に Nobel 賞を受けた生物(化)学者 Jacques Monod による Le hasard et la nécessité という本の最終章に、まさに「概念の選択 la sélection des idées」ということについて、その話があると読んだのは、Douglas Hofstadter の Metamagical Themas この本自体、Martin Gardner という人を知って、そこから Tadashi Tokieda の toy models にまでつながるきっかけになった における引用から。
Shortly thereafter, in 1970, the molecular biologist Jacques Monod came out with his richly stimulating and provocative, book Chance and Necessity. In its last chapter, "The Kingdom and the Darkness", he wrote of the selection of ideas as follows:
For a biologist it is tempting to draw a parallel between the evolution of ideas and that of the biosphere. For while the abstract kingdom stands at a yet greater distance above the biosphere than the latter does above the nonliving universe, ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. I shall not hazard a theory of the selection of ideas. But one may at least try to define some of the principal factors involved in it. This selection must necessarily operate at two levels: that of the mind itself and that of performance.
The performance value of an idea depends upon the change it brings to the behavior of the person or the group that adopts it. The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself. Its capacity to "take", the extent to which it can be "put over" has little to do with the amount of objective truth the idea may contain. The important thing about the stout armature a religious ideology constitutes for a society is not what goes into its structure, but the fact that this structure is accepted, that it gains sway. So one cannot well separate such an idea's power to spread from its power to perform.
The "spreading power" -- the infectivity, as it were -- of ideas, is much more difficult to analyze. Let us say that it depends upon preexisting structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but also undoubtedly upon certain innate structures which we are hard put to identify. What is very plain, however, is that the ideas having the highest invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his anxiety dissolves.
Monod refers to the universe of ideas, or what I earlier termed "idea-space", as "the abstract kingdom". Since he portrays it as a close analogue to the biosphere, we could as well call it the "ideosphere".
Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, ch. 3 (1983)
そこから Sapolsky に立ち返って、
- 選択の過程とは遺伝子や個体 individuals について限られたものではなく、集団 groups や行動などにも適用されうる (behavioural evolution) ことと、
- 選択の対象は genotype と phenotype との区別についてだけでなく、さらに広い範囲に有効である (multi-level selection) こと
が理解できてうれしかった。
そこでは、なによりも、この考え方が生物学者のあいだで受け入れられるようになるまでには、1970年代から David Sloan Wilson を代表とする人たちの長い孤独の努力があり、さらにそれまでつねに反対の立場にあった E. O. Wilson という前世紀後半における生物学の権威が、2004年、80代になってから、長年にわたる自らのまちがいを認め、相手の D. S. Wilson と論文を共著したというドラマがあると知ったことが深く響いた・・
Most in the field now both accept multilevel selection and see room for instances of neo–group selection, especially in humans. Much of this reemergence is the work of two scientists. The first is David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton, who spent decades pushing for neo–group selection (although he sees it not really as “neo” but rather as old-style group selection finally getting some scientific rigor), generally being dismissed, and arguing his case with research of his own, studies ranging from fish sociality to the evolution of religion. He slowly convinced some people, most importantly the second scientist, Edward O. Wilson of Harvard (no relation). E. O. Wilson is arguably the most important naturalist of the last half of the twentieth century, an architect of the sociobiology synthesis along with a number of other fields, a biology god. E. O. Wilson had long dismissed David Sloan Wilson’s ideas. And then a few years back, the octogenarian E. O. Wilson did something extraordinary—he decided he was wrong. And then he published a key paper with the other Wilson—“Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology.” My respect for these two, both as people and as scientists, is enormous.
Robert Sapolsky, Behave (2017), ch. Ten: The Evolution of Behavior
平凡狭窄科学者のあいだでは年齢とともに肥大してゆくはずの権力欲 *1 *2 を免れて、小さいときからの右目の失明、大学生になるまで代数を学んだことのなかったことに屈せず、自らが進化生物学を教えている生徒に囲まれながら a 32-year-old tenured professor at Harvard として微積分を習うことをためらわなかったことで、晩年まで真実への誠実さを生き抜いた E. O. Wilson という人に、僕は一人の真に偉大な科学者の姿をみとめる。
☆ ☆ ☆
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in 1919:
Nor was he - a thirty-year-old war veteran - likely to make many friends among the teenagers with whom he attended lectures at the teacher training college. 'I can no longer behave like a grammar school boy', he wrote to Engelmann, 'and - funny as it sounds - the humiliation is so great for me that often I think I can hardly bear it!' He complained in similar spirit to Russell:
The benches are full of boys of 17 and 18 and I've reached 30. That leads to some very funny situations - and many very unpleasant ones too. I often feel miserable!
Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: the duty of genius (1990), p. 172
*1:L’appétit vient en mangeant, la soif s’en va en buvant. -- Rabelais, Gargantua, chap. 5
*3:37:11 -- And in 2004, you and he published a paper together, in Quarterly Review of Biology. This was, I mean, literally, like, I remember people saying: "Whoa! Did you see that David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson published a paper together !!" -- Extending Darwin's Revolution – David Sloan Wilson & Robert Sapolsky
