Dyson, George B.1997. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. Helix Books, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., ISBN 0-201-40649-7, 286 pp., $25.00.
In the Preface (sub-titled Edge of the World) George Dyson tells us he has attempted "to reconcile a love of nature with an affection for machines. In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machine." His book is about predictions that turned out to be right. In the Acknowledgments, he states: "The engines of evolution are driven by the recombination of genes; human creativity is driven by the recombination of ideas; literature is driven by the recombination of books." His father Freeman J. Dyson wrote Origins of life (1985, Cambridge University press, Cambridge) and his mother wrote a book on mathematics. Both critiqued his manuscript. Thus, when he describes his father's thoughts, we can believe that they are correct! The book has 12 chapters, Notes for each, and an Index.
Thomas Hobbes (1651) wrote: "---all Automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life..." and artificial intelligence. Ampere (1834; who coined the word cybernetique to mean the art of steering) laid the foundation for Wiesner's (1948) definition of cybernetics (coined independently of Ampere) that has come to mean the principles of feedback, adaption, and control. Thus "...we live in an age of embodied logic whose beginnings go back to Thomas Hobbes... Hobbes established that logic and digital computation share common foundations, suggesting a basis in common with mind."
Dyson asks: "Can machines think? Is life a recursive (or mechanically calculable) function? Is intelligence a formal (or mathematically definable) system? ... Biology and technology evidence parallel tendencies toward collective. hierarchical processes based on information exchange. As information is distributed, it tends to be represented (encoded) by increasingly economical (meaningful) forms. This evolutionary process, whereby the most economical or meaningful representation wins, leads to a hierarchy of languages, encoding meaning on levels that transcend comprehension by the system's individual components - whether genes, insects, microprocessors, or human minds."
Does life emerge from the inanimate? "Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole.--- Emergent behavior, by definition, is what's left after everything else has been explained." (Page 9.)
H. G. Wells (1938, page11) pointed out that intelligence is formed from memory. In the same manner, I teach that molecular memory is the information that leads to life and mind. I was pleased to discuss this with Sidney W. Fox and found that he had the same concept of levels of "informed matter": protocellular life emerged from molecules having lower information (amino acids self order to yield thermal proteins which, when moistened, form protocells by the process of self-assembly as described in the Thermal Protein- First Paradigm, Pappelis and Fox 1994, see recent literature listed in this web-site) and evolve to more complex molecular structures having higher levels of information. The human mind (with complex molecules supporting computational complexity of "about 10 billion computers") is the product of emerging (molecular, mobile) intelligence. Does a plant growing toward light exhibit emerging intelligence?
Lynn Margulis (1986; Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution, Simon & Schuster) is quoted: "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking." Life evolved because it facilitated evolution of molecular information (from simple to complex molecules).
In the mid-1800's, with the ever increasing use of machines in the industrial revolutions happening country to country, it was proposed (Butler, 1880, Unconscious Memory, David Bogue, London, see note 41, page 233) that life might be accounted for by machine-like complexities.
Where did the first germ of life come from? Freeman J. Dyson (pages 28-29) focused on the origin of life. "Either life began only once, with the functions of replication and metabolism already present in rudimentary form and linked together from the beginning, or life began twice, with two separate kinds of creatures, one kind capable of metabolism without exact replication, the other kind capable of replication without metabolism." (He posed the question: "Is life one thing or two things?" Are metabolism and replication connected? Can metabolic life exist with replication, or replicative life exist without metabolism?)
Today, these two aspects of life could be called hardware and software components; i.e., protein and nucleic acid. Dual functions suggest dual structures and dual origins. F. J. Dyson continues: "If we admit that the spontaneous emergence of protein structure and of nucleic acid structure out of molecular chaos are both unlikely, it is easier to imagine two unlikely events occurring separately over a long period of time." He commented: "Roughly speaking, the difference of view between me and the community of experts is that the experts believe that RNA came first in the evolution of life whereas I believe that proteins came first...." His son, G. B. Dyson suggests (page 30): "Genotype and phenotype may have started out synonymous and the later become estranged by the central dogma of molecular biology that allows communication from genotype to phenotype but not the other way. Life, however, arrives at distinctions by increments and rarely erases its steps."
According to the Thermal Protein-First Paradigm, the information can go from the thermal proteins to poly-peptides (non-ribosomal peptide synthesis) and poly-nucleotides, etc., to prokaryotic cells with central dogma reactions (ribosomal protein synthesis). That would be one origin, structure-function molecules giving rise to more specialized molecules aimed at specialized information storage molecules (nucleic acids) and functioning molecules (proteins). Thus, the one origin of cellular life simultaneously provided cellular structure capable of exhibiting all of the attributes of life. Life evolved from least to most complex systems (erasing its step from thermal proteins to the more stable and more complex system).
I will close this book review by leaving out the remainder of the growth of computer science. George B. Dyson concludes (page 30): In looking for signs of artificial life, either on the loose or cooked up in the laboratory, however permeable this distinction may prove to be, one should expect to see signs of metabolism without replication and replication without metabolism first. If we look at the world around us, we see a prolific growth of electronic metabolism, populated by virulently replicating code - just as the dual-origin hypothesis predicts."
This book was reviewed by Aristotel Pappelis ( Professor, Department of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901)