Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (14 page)

ROBERT: Once again, I just have to express myself as being dubious. I was dubious of the attention that Dawkins gave to the concept of memes in his original book, and I don't see ideas replicating themselves between people, and being selected in a process analogous to natural selection. I see each of us trying to influence others via our ideas, and each of us being selective regarding the ideas we accept and the ideas we reject, and the way in which we decide to modify ideas that we do accept.

A general term like information transfer, or information maximization, might work better. I just don't know how to relate to it within the one system of thought that I'm comfortable with, which is evolutionary theory. Regarding the notion that many artists and scientists have few or no children, I don't know what the evidence for that is. If it were true, I suppose I would fall back on some hunter-gatherer imaginary scene in which the shaman or the artist made a disproportionate contribution to the welfare of his or her local group, and this made up for any deficiency in personal reproduction.

RMN: You say that natural selection is described as disruptive when it favors extremes to create a polarity and you cite human sexual dimorphism as an example. What do you mean by this?

ROBERT: Well, you'd have to go a ways back in our own lineage, but if you go back in any species that has two sexes, you'd reach a species where there's only one sex, an original hermaphroditic form, which gave rise to the species with two sexes. Now, once you have two separate sexes, if selection operates against intermediates, then it'll tend to push the two sexes further apart.

So to use a crude compelling example, men with breasts or women with masculine characteristics may be less well off than firmly belonging to one sex or another. So to that degree selection operates against the intermediates, and we have to imagine, whenever we see dimorphism in nature--and sexual dimorphism is just one example--that somewhere along the line selection was disrupted, acting against the middle, and in favor of two different positions, not extremes, but two different forms or morphs.

RMN: So, by disrupted you mean it's moving away from the middle?

ROBERT: Yeah, I think so. The only other image of disrupted that I can think of is that if you have a normal distribution to begin with-- a single uniform distribution-- and you disrupt it, you'll end up producing two distributions instead of one.

RMN: The term "disruptive" sounds a little pejorative.

ROBERT: Well, if you'll pardon me, I wouldn't attach too much significance to the term disruptive as in disruptive selection. I see your objection and did when you were asking your earlier question, but it's just a term like normalizing selection and directional selection, just for describing a kind of selection. Now, getting back to the union of opposites--sure, in some cases, as in the sexes in producing offspring. But, I guess answering your question I realize that I came out of a world twenty years ago in which differences between the sexes or within species tended to be minimized and conflict tended to be minimized, and there was always some claim of a higher purpose, benefits for the group or the species, and insufficient attention was paid to conflict, even within relationships that have a cooperative goal. So regarding the sexes, yes, especially in species with male parental investment, especially in cases of monogamy, you can have a large overlap of self-interest between a male and a female, so they're involved in a higher goal, a common goal of, let us say raising offspring together.

RMN: Which is what life is all about, right?

ROBERT: Eventually. But that still should not obscure the fact that they have conflicting self-interest, and that their self-interest may not be maximized in the same way.

DJB: James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have proposed a theory, which they have termed the Gaia hypothesis, to explain how and why life forms on our planet work in such a cooperative fashion together to achieve the delicate chemical ratios in our oceans and atmospheres, which are maintained in such perfect balance that life is made possible and sustained. They claim that the whole earth seems to function much in the way a single organism operates. Do you have any thoughts on this, and how does the "selfish gene" theory that you subscribe to explain this extraordinary phenomenon?

ROBERT: Well, I'm really not familiar with this area. From my bias, I've always imagined, in so far as I've thought about it at all, that the organisms are just busy concerning themselves with what's good for each other, and the result is some kind of steady state that is beneficial, more broadly put. Some organisms consume oxygen, others generate oxygen. There's going to be a balance struck between those two sets of organisms, some kind of density-dependent laws that come into effect.

I think that it would be a mistake to imagine that the organisms are attempting to set up something in the biosphere itself, or to create a biosphere, but I may be a little bit old-fashioned in that approach, and I know that geologists, and people that study the earth as a whole, do often imagine that it's like an organism, and maybe it is. I just don't know. Nothing in my line of work would suggest so, that I know of.

RMN: You refer a number of times in your book
Social Evolution
to the "apparent coincidences" of natural selection. When literally translated this term coincidence means simply the coordination of incidents. Would you venture further and postulate as to the directing force that is coordinating these incidents? Do you see any kind of teleology in nature or do you view all events as the product of mere chance? Does Natural Selection play dice with the universe, and is the only meaning to life in your view, really, more life?

ROBERT: I don't see any teleology in nature. The teleology was beaten out of me in my training. It was an important aspect of paleontology, for example, to learn there were no trends, inevitable trends, of groups tending to always get larger, or always go in one direction or another.

RMN: What are your views on genetic engineering and the possibility, which to some scientists is a very real one, that we will soon have the ability to control our evolution by programming our future genetic forms?

ROBERT: I have not been frightened by genetic engineering. I do not believe it will create monsters that will run rampant. I've always believed that natural selection would still be acting, and acting very strongly.

RMN: On the scientists that create the genetic mutations?

ROBERT: Well, I was thinking on the genetic mutants themselves. In other words, when the, say, anti-frost bacteria were first sprayed on plants here in California experimentally, people said, well Jesus what happens if you got a monster bacterium that's going to cut loose and cause all sorts of havoc, and run amok. I just didn't imagine that it would happen because monsters are being produced, probably daily, in this world, through mutation and recombination, and are being selected against, and I didn't see, and don't see any reason why artificial forms created in the lab wouldn't be subject to strong selection too. As for genetic engineering in the human species, I imagine it's inevitable, and Probably in a hundred or two hundred years we'll scarcely be able to imagine the genetic manipulations that'll be possible.

RMN: In your book
Social Evolution
you state that the primary function of sex is to generate genetic novelty in the offspring, which can better adapt to the changing environmental conditions. You also say that natural selection favors individuals who maximize the number of offspring. Two factors are being described here--that of quality and that of quantity. How do you see these factors operating in evolution?

ROBERT: The simple answer is that quality can always be converted into quantity for the purposes of evolutionary theory. So, one pair of parents can produce four offspring of low quality, where quality is measured as their ability to survive and reproduce, and another pair of parents can produce two offspring of high quality, were quality is again defined the same way. In that case, after awhile, the high quality offspring win out, are more numerous. That's just a tautological system, in which quality refers to eventual ability to survive and reproduce, and therefore converts into quantity.

RMN: Do you see these influences as being equally potent-- fifty-fifty?

ROBERT: Yes.

DJB: Approximately 22,000 Americans commit suicide annually. Clearly suicidal behavior is non-adaptive, and it appears to he related to sexual development- that is, the behavior seems to emerge during adolescence, and is often triggered by the loss of a lover. How do you explain it evolutionarily?

ROBERT: I don't necessarily explain it evolutionarily. Twenty-two thousand out of two hundred million is still a relatively low frequency. Evolutionary arguments have to start being evoked where you get up to one percent of the population, or something like that, as in schizophrenia. Your statement that suicide is clearly non-adaptive, I think, has to be viewed with a little bit of suspicion. I'm not saying that it is adaptive, but I'm saying one can imagine circumstances under which suicide is adaptive.

You can start with the old Eskimo story of the elders who walked out into the cold to die, to save their children energy and effort. A certain amount of suicide of the elderly has that form. It is also possible for suicide to be adaptive when the alternative is murder of close relatives, or some other behavior that's going to bring genetic consequences. I think there might be a recent paper, that I've not read, on an adaptive approach to suicide, but I don't see any obvious adaptive sense to it.

RMN: Neophobia, the fear of novel stimuli, can be viewed in some situations as enhancing reproductive success, and in other situations as inhibiting it. If one species evolves to be fearful of novelty, and one species evolves to embrace novelty, how do you think those two species will fare?

ROBERT: I think put in that extreme form one would tend to place one's bet with the species that embraced novelty, just because novelty is intrinsic to the living world. Evolutionary novelty is occurring in all species, and other species are part of our environment. So even leaving aside geological and climatic changes, which are themselves occurring, there's novelty always being generated. So it's hard to imagine a long-term strategy successfully based on extreme neophobia. On the other hand, a lot of creatures, speaking strictly off the top of my head, seem to show some sort of balance between extreme neophobia and just rampant embrace of everything new. I could think of different species, different examples, where the young are, like I say, somewhere in between.

DJB: Do you believe that life may have evolved on other planets and star systems, and if so, what possible courses of evolution do you think they might have taken that would be different from our own?

ROBERT: I do believe that life has almost certainly evolved elsewhere. Our best understanding of astronomy and of the origin of life on this planet suggests that there are plenty of stars that are appropriate, plenty of planets presumed around those stars that are appropriate.

DJB: Several years ago, Nobel prize winner Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, wrote a book entitled
Life Itself,
in which he proposes the idea that life may have been seeded on our planet by a species of higher intelligence than our own, through the use of genetically engineered spores that are blown through space by radiation pressures. In the light of our own species' progress with genetic engineering, do you think this is a possible explanation for how life originated on our planet, and if so, do you think it is possible that evolution may, in some sense, be developing according to a particular plan?

ROBERT: I think it's possible. I don't quite see the gain to the other organism in doing this process. The seeding of the earth, according to our understanding, would have then occurred about four billion years ago, and it took four billion years to produce creatures as humble as ourselves. We can't do yet what Crick is saying the other creature can do. So after four billion years they still ain't got nothing that matches themselves. I don't quite know what the function of this would be.

RMN: There is much concern these days about the problems of over-population. It seems that the survival of the human species, and possibly the planet, may now depend upon our ability to limit reproduction. As natural selection theory depends upon the idea of reproductive success being the main goal of evolution, what are your views on this?

ROBERT: I think that, next to nuclear warfare, it's probably the best candidate for driving us to extinction, perhaps in conjunction with nuclear warfare, of any of the possible candidates. I think a lot will depend on how far we deplete resources before we reverse the population explosion, assuming we finally reach a stage where we do. Certainly at some point we have to limit reproduction to a ZPG, zero population growth, or steady-state. We know that from elementary considerations.