Directed Evolution - Revisited

Below is an article I originally wrote in 2012. I recently rediscovered it and thought it might make interesting reading. From my point of view, it reads fairly well and it's fundamental premise seems to still hold. However, I'm not satisfied with the ending - it seems a bit of a non-sequitur. I had written an alternative final sentence but for now, I've left it as is.

What do you think?

Directed Evolution? There's an often stated view about Evolution that says that it is an undirected process. Organisms evolve through random mutations producing offspring that are better (or worse) adapted to their environments. The better adapted survive and create their own offspring and so on. This process, as currently conveyed, has no direction or purpose - organisms simply become better suited to their environments over time. Thus, human beings are a point in the web of life and are certainly not an end goal.

This view as it stands is uncontentious except for a discovery made some 76 years ago by Alan Turing. Turing's seminal paper, introducing the concept of the Universal Turing Machine(1) laid the groundwork for the Computer and importantly, proved the remarkable, and perhaps counterintuitive, conjecture that all Computers, in terms of fundamental capabilities, and regardless of their physical componentry, are logically identical. Crucially, the same mathematics and logic that were used to create the Universal Turing Machine are the very same tools we have used, with spectacular success, to model the extremely small and extremely large in our Universe. In other words, a Universal Turing Machine is a universal concept.

With this in mind, now let's consider an interesting thought experiment by rewinding back to the time of the primordial sludge that was the origin of the first life on our planet. If we imagine restarting time from this point, the same process of evolution would occur but this time, due to random differences in environment and mutations, it is by no means certain that anything like a human being would evolve - in other words, there's nothing inevitable about evolution producing a gangly upright biped with a huge head. Now let's imagine running this 'simulation' a million times.

There's three possible outcomes of which perhaps the most likely is that the evolution process would eventually cease due to some catastrophic seismic or astronomical event. The second possibility is that evolution would reach some kind of 'plateau' where intelligent life never occurs due to insufficient selection pressure to adapt creatures in that direction. This could happen if, for example, there were little or no predators that forced selection for larger brain size in their prey.

The third alternative, which happens to be the world we live in, is that the evolution race would continue and eventually produce intelligent creatures, capable of abstract thought. These creatures will in turn discover mathematics and logic and eventually, the concept of a computer. Their individual conception may differ in many details but due to the universality of the Universal Turing Machine, it would be in it's true essence, identical to our own. This is the amazing and inevitable outcome of evolution- whenever it lasts longs enough to create intelligent life, the final result will always be the discovery of the Universal Turing Machine. Evolution can twist and turn in a myriad ways and the path to this outcome may take very different lengths of time to achieve, but ultimately, we end always at the same point, in the discovery of the same universal concept. This discovery on it's own is is only part of the story.

To understand its' consequences, we need to understand how this Universal Turing Machine concept might manifest itself in the real world.Ray Kurzweil,in his 2005 book,”The Singularity is Near”, defines the concept of a Singularity(2) as when he expects “ computer-based intelligences to significantly exceed the sum total of human brainpower”. The date Kurzweil ascribes to the Singularity, 2045, remains a source of contention but it seems clear this point will be reached within a relatively short time span, given continued and quickening advances in computer technology. Kurzweil's then explains how, through ever more intelligent machines designing the next generation of even more intelligent machines, an exponential growth in intelligence is achieved, leaving us poor human beings trailing in their wake. (How they will treat is unclear - consider our attitude to 'simple' beings like the amoeba!)

But what is clear is that superhuman intelligences, now freed from the shackles of flesh and mortality can achieve superhuman feats. For example, time becomes irrelevant to a self-repairing machine with an unending source of solar energy. Might they then travel to the stars, in journeys of millions of years to meet other intelligent life, itself perhaps derived from similar evolutionary processes and also based on the same Universal Turing Machine underpinnings? So this undirected process of evolution,whenever it results in intelligent life, arrives at a single outcome - a new type of being that transcends its' DNA origins and, in our particular world, its' human progenitors.

Might this perspective on the human condition help us treat the biosphere with a touch more humility and respect? 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine 2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity