Contents

This page describes several key concepts that will be taken as axioms (fundamental statements that are considered correct, or at least provisionally so) for the discussion, in other words they are the foundation blocks on which other concepts are built:

Key Concepts

Key Concept: The Anthropic Principle

The Anthropic Principle is a concept that is very profound, while at the same time just stating the blindingly obvious.  It says, basically: “Don’t be surprised to find yourself in a place in the universe so perfectly suited to life, because if you were not in a place in the universe so perfectly suited to life, you would not be there to wonder why you were in a place in the universe so perfectly suited to life.”  This is hard to argue with and is an effective answer to questions like why is the Earth at a distance from the sun that makes our planet not too-hot-for-life, nor too-cold-for-life, but just-right-for-life (called the Goldilocks zone for obvious reasons), and why it has a just-right air pressure for water to be liquid, and with gravity that is just-right for holding onto the atmosphere, and so on.  Since there are trillions of planets in our galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, lots and lots of those planets will be in the Goldilocks zone, and it is only on these worlds that life can emerge and start asking questions like those presented here.  That is the blindingly obvious aspect of the anthropic principle, but there are more profound aspects that emerge when discussing the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Key Concept: Skepticism is a Good Starting Point

In the section on What we should believe it was proposed that nothing in our experience of the world is thoroughly, totally, absolutely certain and also that intuition can be an unreliable guide.  Skepticism seems to be an appropriate starting point, then, when considering an answer to one of life’s big questions, especially since we have been wrong about a lot of our early, deeply held beliefs, even though we were absolutely certain about them at the time: The Earth is the center of the universe?  Certainly.  Lightning is sent by Zeus?  No doubt about it.  The heart is where the mind resides?  Definitely.  Only four elements:  earth, air, fire and water?  Entirely reasonable.  Given such a lousy historical track record on Big Questions, it is astonishing that we should give any credence at all to concepts that “seem right” to us, concepts that we want to believe, in other words.

While it might be tempting to think that ill-informed beliefs (such as a sun-centered universe) are a thing of the past, many persist today.   For example, we still look for support for our belief that people have souls, that there is life after death, and that we are watched over by a loving God.  What is more, the strategies that we use to defend these beliefs (the ones that natural selection encourages us to believe) are often extreme, such as ignoring contradictory evidence, placing far too much weight on our own, flawed intuition, and even presenting faith (which is, after all, holding rigidly to a belief with absolutely no justification) as a great virtue.

Everything is a belief, with at least some level of uncertainty associated with it.  And for beliefs associated with the Big Questions of Life, this level of uncertainty is going to be significant, and a high level of skepticism is thus called for.

Key Concept: There are No Absolute Facts

We tend to build our internal models of the world around us concept on top of concept, brick on top of brick, as if the elements within them are unquestionable, as if those concept bricks were perfectly solid.  However, because everything is uncertain to some degree or other, a more correct representation of our understanding of the world would be made from concept bricks of varying robustness, along a spectrum from pretty-solid facts all the way through to flimsy, crumbly, wild-assed guesses.  A central theme of this website is that there are no absolute facts; none of the bricks are indestructible.

It is worth justifying this assertion, since it might sound a rather odd.  We are, after all, seemingly surrounded by things that are clearly, unarguably real: the ground, cows, sunsets, death, taxes, apple crumble, and so on, and yet, even with what seems to be undeniably factual, there is always the possibility, however tiny, that the cow or the sunset in front of us is actually an optical illusion, or a dream or a hallucination brought about by drugs (perhaps surreptitiously introduced into our food by that not-very-amusing friend of ours) or by an undiagnosed brain tumor.  The chances of this being the case may be fantastically tiny, but they are not zero.   We cannot, for example, completely discount the possibility that we are living in a virtual world (like that in “The Matrix”) projected directly into our brains, a world created by a talented alien programmer, perhaps, with such inventive notions as mass, sunshine and mint choc chip ice cream.  This is a version of the philosophical concept of solipsism, which proposes that we cannot be sure that the world outside of our heads exists.  Since this is impossible to refute conclusively, everything that we think we know for certain can be challenged.

One of the factors that hinders our attempts to answer life’s Big Questions is the difficulty of proving conclusively any proposal, which encourages us to just give up our quest for the truth or to rely too heavily on our intuition, or on popular opinion.

Key Concept:  Even in Science, There are No Facts

One might argue that we have been getting a lot closer to certain truths in recent centuries, but, even after Isaac Newton came along and finally started nailing down some hard and fast theories about the world, the truth was still elusive.  His equations of gravity, motion and light, which seemed initially to be such incontrovertible depictions of reality, were shown, with the advent of the theories of relativity and quantum physics, to be just approximate descriptions of a world much weirder than we had ever imagined.  Now we have to wrestle with crazy concepts such as three dimensional space being curved into a fourth dimension, and people moving at different speeds measuring the passage of time at different rates, and photons that are particles and waves at the same time, and quantum-mechanical cats that are both alive and dead until they are observed.  Quantum mechanics is particularly irritating to those of us hoping for a stable, well-defined world, since it states that we cannot predict the outcome of any events (at least those on the scale of elementary particles) with certainty; the best that we can do is predict probabilities.

Where is certainty, then, in the world of science?  We cannot even be totally sure about the bizarre, unintuitive worlds of general relativity and quantum physics, even though their predictions have been experimentally verified time and time again to astonishing accuracy, since there are still major questions about how the two theories interact; hinting that these theories may just be approximations of some deeper, and no doubt even more bizarre, reality.  Attempts to produce a theory of everything have thrown in even more mind-mangling views of existence, such as more dimensions (the most popular current view is that there are 11 in total), other universes (perhaps an infinite number), or our universe being a three dimensional projection of two dimensional reality (the speculative theory called the holographic principle.  In this morass of weirdness, certainty is hard to find.

This point that, even in science, the truth is elusive, was emphasized by Samuel Arbesman, when he claimed that half of what scientists think they know will be wrong or irrelevant in 45 years (the “half-life of facts”) [Samuel Arbesman (2012). The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. Current Hardcover. ISBN 1-59184-472-X].  It might seem as if this is an argument for ignoring science in our quest for provisional beliefs, but it is still the best tool that we have.

Key Concept: The Human World is Particularly Uncertain

When we turn to the living world of people, with all of their complicated thoughts and attitudes and interactions, things get less certain, not more.  Modern thinking suggests that, far more than we ever believed, we are driven by our hard-to-fathom subconscious, while our consciousness, far from guiding our actions, just watches what we do and comes up with a plausible narrative for why we did it.  We are bad enough at knowing with certainty why we ourselves do what we do, then, let alone knowing what is going on in other people’s heads.  If, therefore, anyone starts telling you how clearly they understand the human condition, it is best to treat them with extreme skepticism (including when considering this current work).  Similarly, when considering human behavior, economic forecasts, political situations, and so on (anything where people are involved), it is very hard to predict anything with certainty.  We try to make predictions anyway of course, indeed we have to try just to make progress in the world (the alternative is paralysis through indecision), but we rarely acknowledge the flimsiness of the bases for our predictions and decisions.

Key Concept: Natural Selection Explains our Physical Form

Natural selection is the process by which certain inheritable traits in a population of Replicators (such as animals) become more widespread.  Traits that help the Replicators survive and reproduce, such as sharper teeth or longer legs) spread throughout the population.  The Replicators develop (evolve) through the generations as a result of any tiny but beneficial random changes (caused partly by random mutations) in those inherited traits, as mapped by our genes (the blueprints of our bodies), accumulating into big changes.  The random changes have to be tiny to be beneficial because our bodies are such delicately balanced instruments that large random changes are very likely to just mess us up (birth defects, for example, usually reduce a creature’s viability); throwing an extra engine into a random part of a BMW (lodging it in the sunroof, perhaps) is unlikely to make it go faster.  Only subtle changes (a slightly wider fuel line, perhaps) have a chance of improving the Replicator.  What this all means is that evolution is a very slow process.

As an example of evolution, a long time ago there were creatures roaming the plains eating leaves from trees, and during times of drought there were not enough leaves to go around.  If one of these animals mutated to have an ever-so-slightly-longer neck, then it could reach the ever-so-slightly higher leaves that were inaccessible to others.  Such an animal would have had an advantage in terms of health and survival and therefore would have tended to produce more offspring than its rivals.  These offspring are likely to inherit the ever-so-slightly-longer neck and would share the advantages of its parent and have lots of offspring, most of which would have the ever-so-slightly-longer-neck genes.  Somewhere down the evolutionary road one of the descendants might mutate to have an even longer neck, which is even more advantageous, and the process continues.  After many, many generations the plains are covered with these freaky-looking giraffe creatures with their ridiculously long necks.

What this means is that over millions of years our bodies became better and better adapted to our environment, better and better at spreading our genes throughout the population.

Key Concept: Natural Selection is Imperfect

The process of natural selection does not fashion each and every individual characteristic so that it aids survival and reproduction in all cases.  Rather it ends up with a characteristic that improves the creature, but only on average.  A trait produced by natural selection might actually be quite harmful in certain situations, but, if this is outweighed by the situations where it is beneficial, the trait will spread throughout future generations.  Indeed a trait can actually be a real handicap for some specific significant aspects of life, as long as it really, really helps in other important areas.  The male peacock’s tail is the often-cited example: fantastic for attracting mates (and so spreading its genes through sex), but a real liability when trying to hide from predators behind a small cabbage.  Overall it is better for the males of the species to have it, even though some individual males might die because of it.

Natural selection works to optimize the overall animal, which is why humans have not evolved to be super strong, super fast and super smart.  Even though more of those traits might seem better than less, they come with a cost: the resources needed to support them.  The brain is the perfect example; although it seems to be a small lump that just sits there, it burns up about twenty percent of the energy used by the body, and, in the brutal environment that our ancestors lived in (a world of very scarce resources), needing to find twenty percent more food could have meant the difference between life and death.  A bigger brain might have helped them get more food, of course, but not enough to provide the extra energy.  We have evolved to be smart enough that the benefit of those smarts (in that ancestral world) just outweighs the drawback of the energy requirements of the brain that provided those smarts.  Being smarter would have been detrimental in that world.  This is the underlying reason why our world models are simple, approximate sketches rather than perfectly accurate depictions of reality.  We have to use our energy hungry brains as efficiently as possible.  Our world models are good enough for their purpose and no better.

Not all aspects of our minds and bodies can be directly attributed to an evolutionary benefit, because traits can have a number of byproduct characteristics that do not themselves increase gene spreading (or at least that is not why they have evolved).  For instance, bones evolved to be white, but the reason that  they evolved this way was not because whiteness made them better bones.  Rather they evolved to be strong, which was achieved with calcium, which happens to make them white; the whiteness is simply a byproduct.  As another example, it has been speculated that the above view is wrong and that the giraffe’s long neck actually did not evolve to reach high leaves; rather the giraffe evolved long legs to better defend itself from predator attacks.  In this view, the giraffe’s long neck could be seen as an evolutionary byproduct that lengthened with the legs so that it could bend down to drink water while still standing.  Maybe the long necks also helped giraffes reach high leaves, but that is not why they evolved [Pincher, Chapman (1949). “Evolution of the Giraffe,” Nature vol. 164, pp. 29-30 ].

These byproducts are particularly important when considering Evolutionary Psychology.

Key Concept: Our Minds Evolved Just Like Our Bodies (Evolutionary Psychology)

What applies to our bodies also applies to our minds, so, just as natural selection picks and encourages certain physical traits that help us spread our genes, it also picks and encourages certain mental traits that have the same effect.  This concept, evolutionary psychology, is not universally accepted, but it is generally so, and makes logical sense because wolverines, having evolved evil fangs and claws, have to also evolve the nasty disposition that encourages their use.  Timid wolverines would become extinct very quickly.  Likewise, if gerbils had somehow developed the wolverine’s don’t-mess-with-me attitude they would have long since disappeared from the planet.

In the same way, then, that our bodies have became better and better suited to gene spreading, so did our minds, our personalities, our attitudes and behaviors.  We evolved both the tools and the motivation to use them.  Furthermore, just as there are byproducts of the physical traits that help gene spreading, so are there mental and behavioral byproducts.  As an example, a byproduct of the hand-eye coordination that evolved to allow us to do tasks like throwing a spear (so that we could better feed our family), also helps us to play Grand Theft Auto (although the latter is a lot less helpful to natural selection).  Likewise, we have a fear of harmless snakes (or even just slithery things) as a byproduct of our very helpful fear of poisonous snakes.

Key Concept: Evolution is All about Grandchildren

Since these proposals are based on the evolutionary principles, it is worth discussing how evolution works.  To be good at spreading our genes we have to be good at a few things: we have to be good enough at surviving to reach child-bearing age (we have to live to breed), and we have to be good at having lots of strong children when we reach that age (which means being good at attracting mates with strong genes, and also being good at fending off competition for those mates).  Furthermore (and this is especially true for humans since our children are more helpless at birth than most animals), we have to be good at caring for our children until they can fend for themselves.  One (slightly simplistic) way of looking at natural selection that captures all of these requirements is that it encourages characteristics that maximize the number of grandchildren that humans are likely to have.  Natural selection has, therefore, made us lusty, jealous survivors with strong parental instincts.

It has been argued that evolutionary psychology is the basis for all of our behavior.  Certainly, given this framework, our obsession with sex is not surprising, but a lot of our other obsessions can also be traced back to the same need to have grandchildren.  For example, buying an expensive car, making works of art, getting new clothes, telling jokes, and so on are basically just mating displays; we want to demonstrate to prospective mates that we have the skills, knowledge and resources to look after any children that we might have in the future.

Key Concept: We did Not Evolve for the Twenty First Century

A consequence of the slow process of natural selection is that we are not well-suited to our current 21st century lives.  We evolved over millions of years to be well-suited to the harsh life of the African savanna, and evolution has not had time to respond to the rapid and dramatic changes to our environment over the last few thousand years.  We do not have hands that evolved for typing, or eyes that have been optimized for analyzing traffic, nor do we have minds that are perfectly suited for polite society (for example, the adrenaline rush that really helped our ancestors battle warthogs is less helpful when we are cut off at the traffic lights); some parts of our brains are still operating as they did millions of years ago, scanning the coffee shop for predators and selecting food from the menu using the assumption that sugar is a very rare commodity (the bygone Pleistocene savanna was a donut-free zone).

Key Concept: The Environment for which we did Evolve

Proposing that we have been shaped to perform well, not in our modern world but in a world long past, is only helpful if we know what that bygone age looked like.  Fortunately we do have a fairly good idea: we did most of our evolving in Africa in the Pleistocene Epoch (from 2.6 million years ago until about 11,700 years ago), which was a pretty cushy existence until the forests dried up and our ape ancestors found themselves on the savanna, a brutally harsh environment with precious little shelter or food (as a result we obsess about both).  Food was in such short supply that we had to keep moving to find new sources, making us nomadic hunter gatherers (leading to an obsession with cars and other forms of transport), and we particularly struggled to find the fruits that were so much a part of our diet back in the good old forest days (making us dangerously obsessive about the 21st century’s ultra-efficient sugar-delivery systems).  The landscape was full of predators looking for delicious human-size snacks, making us generally nervous and insecure.  Physically we were poorly-equipped to deal with these fangy threats (too weak to fight, too slow to run, too large to hide), but we survived by evolving brains that allowed us to think our way out of trouble.  The brain evolved quickly because in that scary environment, those smart enough to avoid predators and to work out that we could survive on a wide range of different foods had a lot more children than those that did not (the latter were hampered by being dead).  Relying on our brains rather than our bodies offered a huge benefit: a body that is perfectly evolved to one environment is not likely to work as well in another environment (cheetahs would freeze in Norway), whereas humans could use their brains to become generalists, surviving in most parts of the world (Norway is quite nice if you have the ingenuity to fashion a coat).  The general environment was so unpleasant for our frail ancestors that a solitary life was a short life and survival was only possible if we banded together for safety and to share resources, making us highly social animals and also explaining why we are such political animals (obsessed about status and terrified of messing up socially and ending up with a smaller share of scarce resources, or being cast out of the clan entirely).  The bottom line was: for our ancestors life was pretty unpleasant, but the unpleasantness drove their evolution.  Today we obsess about, and crave those things that we needed to survive in that earlier era, especially the things that were hardest to come by.