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Nature, Bloody in Tooth and Claw?
Vernor Vinge
Department of Mathematical Sciences
San Diego State University
(c) 1996 by Vernor Vinge
(This article may be reproduced for noncommercial
purposes if it is copied in its entirety,
including this notice.)
The original version of this article
was prepared for the 1996 British National Science
Fiction Convention (Evolution).
The notion of evolution has frightening undertones. The
benevolent view of Mother Nature in many children's nature films often
seems a thin facade over an unending story of pain and death and
betrayal. For many, the basic idea behind evolution is that one
creature succeeds at the expense of another, and that death without
offspring is the price of failure. In the human realm, this is often
the explanation for the most egregious personal and national behavior.
This view percolates even into our humor. When someone commits an
extreme folly and is fatally thumped for it, we sometimes say, "Hey,
just think of it as evolution in action."
In fact, these views of evolution are very limited ones. At best
they capture one small aspect of the enormous field of emergent
phenomena. They miss a paradigm for evolution that predates Lord
Tennyson's "bloody in tooth and claw" by thousands of million
years. And they miss a paradigm that has appeared in just the last
three centuries, one that may become spectacularly central to our
world.
Long before humankind, before the higher animals and even the
lower ones, there were humbler creatures ... the bacteria. These are
far too small to see, smaller than even the single-celled eukaryotes
like amoebas and paramecia. When most people think of bacteria at all,
they think of rot and disease. More dispassionately, people think of
bacteria as utterly primitive: "they don't have sex", "they don't have
external organization", "they don't have cellular nuclei".
Certainly, I am happy to be a human and not a bacterium! And
yet, in the bacteria we have a novelty and a power that are
awesome. At the same time most folk proclaim the bacteria's primitive
nature, they also complain of the bacteria's ability to evolve around
our antibiotics. (And alas, this ability is so effective that what was
in the 1950s and 1960s a medical inconvenience is becoming an intense
struggle to sustain our antibiotic advantage, to avoid what _Science_
magazine has called the "post anti-microbial era".) The bacteria have
a different paradigm for evolution than the one we naively see in the
murderous behavior of metazoans.
The bacteria do not have sex as we know it, but they do have
something much more efficient: the ability to exchange genetic
material among themselves -- across an immensely broad range of
bacterial types. Bacteria compete and consume one another, but just as
often both losers and winners contribute genetic information to
later solutions. Though bacteria are correctly called a Kingdom of
Life, the boundary between their "species" is nearly invisible. One
might better regard their Kingdom as a library, containing some 4000
million years of solutions. Some of the solutions have not been
dominant for a very long time. The strictly anaerobic bacteria were
driven from the open surface almost 2000 million years ago, when free
oxygen poisoned their atmosphere. The thermophilic bacteria survive in
near-boiling water. Millions of less successful (or currently
unsuccessful) solutions hide in niches around the planet. The
Kingdom's Library has some very musty, unlit corners, but the lore is
not forgotten: the Kingdom is a vast search and retrieval engine,
creating new solutions from the bacteria's ability for direct transfer
of genetic information. This is the engine which we with our tiny
computers and laboratories are up against when we talk airily of
"acquired antibiotic resistance". For the bacteria, evolution is a
competition in which little is ever lost, and yet solutions are
found. (I recommend the books of Lynn Margulis for a knowledgeable
discussion of this point of view. Margulis is a world-class
microbiologist whose writing is both clear and eloquent.)
For the most part, we metazoans have a strong sense of
self. More, we have a very strong sense of boundary -- where our Self
ends and the Otherness begins. It is this sense of self and of
boundary that makes the process of evolution so unpleasant to many.
The bacterial Kingdom continues today. It has been stable
for a very long time, and will probably be so for a long time to
come. It has its limits, ones it seems unlikely ever to transcend.
Nevertheless, I find some comfort in it as an alternative to the
conflict and pain and death we see in evolution among the
metazoans. And many of of the bacteria's good features I see reflected
in a second paradigm, one that has risen only in the last few
centuries: the paradigm of the human business corporation.
Corporations do compete. Some win and some lose (not always for
reasons that any sensible person would relate to quality!), and
eventually things change, often in a very big way. Unlike bacteria,
corporations exist across an immense range of sizes and can be
hierachical. As such, they have a capacity for complexity that does
not exist in the bacterial model. And yet, like bacteria, their
competition is mainly a matter of knowledge, and knowledge need never
be lost. Very few participants actually die in their competition: the
knowledge and insight of the losers can often continue. As with the
bacterial paradigm, the corporate model maintains only low thresholds
between Selves. Very much unlike the bacterial paradigm, the corporate
one admits of constant change (up and down) in the size of the Self.
At present, the notion of corporations as living creatures is
a whimsy or a legal contrivance (or a grim, Hobbesian excuse for
tyranny), but we are entering an era where the model may be one to
look at in a very practical sense. Our computers are becoming
more and more powerful. I have argued elsewhere that computers will
probably attain superhuman power within the next thirty years. At the
same time, we are networking computers into a worldwide system. We
humans are part of that system, the dominant and most important
feature in its success. But what will the world be like when the
machines move beyond our grasp and we enter the Post-Human era? In a
sense that is beyond human knowing, since the major players will be as
gods compared to us. Yet we see hints of what might come by
considering our past, and that is why many people are frightened of
the Post-Human era: they reason by analogy with our human treatment of
the dumb animals -- and from that they have much to fear.
Instead, I think the other paradigms for competition and
evolution will be much more appropriate in the Post-Human era. Imagine
a worldwide, distributed reasoning system in which there are thousands
of millions of nodes, many of superhuman power. Some will have
knowable identity -- say the ones that are currently separated by low
bandwidth links from the rest -- but these separations are constantly
changing, as are the identities themselves. With lower thresholds
between Self and Others, the bacterial paradigm returns. Competition
is not for life and death, but is more a sharing in which the losers
continue to participate. And as with the corporate paradigm, this new
situation is one in which very large organisms can come into
existence, can work for a time at some extremely complex problem --
and then may find it more efficient to break down into smaller souls
(perhaps of merely human size) to work on tasks involving greater
mobility or more restricted communication resources. This is a world
that is fightening still, since its nature undermines what is for most
of us the bedrock of our existence, the notion of persistent self. But
it need not be a cruel world, and it need not be one of cold
extinction. It may in fact be the transcendent nature dreamed of by
many brands of philosopher throughout history.
