Einstein and Lennon

This is an excerpt from Einstein's Enlightenment

Einstein and Lennon

John O. Campbell

Many of the greatest challenges that life presents us take the form of choosing the type of person we will be. Clearly, these choices are tightly constrained, largely by the cultural circumstances in which we are born; we all learn the language of our parents as well as countless other attributes specified by our culture. However, all cultures provide some wiggle room; some choices are individual ones and may be chosen from the menu which our culture makes available.

Thus we copy from among the cultural beliefs, attitudes and ways of being which the evolution of our culture has made available and make this selection our own. This allows for some individual variations as the copying is never perfect; we all exhibit some small variations in the cultural traits we adopt.

Still, how do we best chose or select from those choices available to us? Social scientists studying cultural evolution understand that a common and successful strategy is to make the same choices we observe being made by the most successful individuals in our group (1).

This is a brilliant selection mechanism as it allows one to adopt the best of the cultural traits which their culture has evolved. It also furthers cultural evolution in that the most successful cultural traits tend to become mainstream or conventional.

I will just note in passing that this description of cultural evolution is in terms of a Darwinian process: one with copying, variation and selection.

A related strategy for individuals, one which minimizes the stress of agonizing over such weighty decisions, is to choose the culture’s conventional answers, those adopted by the majority. Conventional traits are likely to be relatively successful and so this provides an easy way of arriving at a near-optimal choice.

However, there may be good reasons for not always taking this easy path. What has proved successful in the past, may not be as successful now or in the future. As well, there may be new successful opportunities that have not yet been widely recognized or adopted by the wider culture. Thus the adoption of non-conventional cultural traits can result in a big payoff but unfortunately, this is unlikely; most unconventional traits are unsuccessful and are ultimately rejected by the wider culture.  Yet from the perspective of cultural evolution it is the few non-conventional but successful traits that provide evolutionary progress, which allow for the expansion of the conventional wisdom.

Again I will note in passing that this is similar to the evolutionary process in biology where most mutations are harmful but it is the rare beneficial ones that are adopted by the population and which contribute to its evolution.

It is difficult to think of an individual who originated more successful non-conventional traits than Albert Einstein. His unconventional understanding of scientific subjects is widely considered brilliant and is a legend. I will argue that, as well, his non-conventional understanding of religion and humanism, although less well known, are equally brilliant. Those unsatisfied with selecting their life choices from the conventional may do well to consider the alternatives which Einstein has bequeathed us.

Einstein was able to synergize between two of his most brilliant eccentricities to create a blazingly radical vision of human society. The first is his unequalled ability to develop a logical chain of thought including its many implications and the second is his great powers for free-thinking, brilliantly original and unconstrained by conventional bias. He thought, in big brush strokes, about what human society was and what it could be.

He died an isolated man. Although his insights had transformed all of physics and formed the starting point for the generations of physicists following him, he left behind no devoted group of followers.  During the last half of his career, he conducted a futile quest to unify General Relativity with the quantum forces. His other scientific legacy during this period was sniping at the consensus claim of quantum theory that it was a complete description of micro-reality and the numerous attempts he made to demonstrate this incompleteness. Among those in the consensus, his non-believer stance contributed to a widespread view that the old man had lost his marbles.

Outside of physics Einstein’s legacy is practically unknown, his philosophical and sociological views remain obscure. At the time of his death in 1955, one of those waves of conservative fanaticism that periodically sweep America was well underway. 

Conservative elements had whipped the citizenry into a nationalistic frenzy through false claims that their government and society was riddled with the agents and spies of their great enemy, the communists. The hitherto obscure US senator, Joseph McCarthy was rocketed to national prominence by speeches he made fanning this paranoid frenzy:

The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

Fortunately, these periodic waves of witch hunting do eventually pass and in late 1954 McCarthy was censured by the Senate for his excesses. His personal popularity quickly faded and President Eisenhower, who had always despised McCarthy, quipped that McCarthyism was now "McCarthywasm"

Einstein did not find McCarthyism amusing. In the 1930s he had direct experience of Hitler and the Nazis, they had raided his apartment, confiscated his belongings, denounced his science, and chased him out of Germany to America. He was neither cowed nor deceived by the likes of Hitler and wrote to a friend (2):

A group of armed bandits in Germany has successfully silenced the responsible segments of the population and imposed a kind of revolution from below which will soon succeed in destroying or paralyzing everything that is civilized in society.

He was certainly not cowed by the pathetic antics of McCarthyism. Although under scrutiny himself, Einstein argued that those called before the committee should assert their rights (3):

Invoking the Fifth Amendment was problematic, Einstein wrote, because “the individual is offered no legal middle ground for him to defend his actual rights.” In closing, he pointed to a more “revolutionary” tactic - non-cooperation, like Gandhi used with great success against the legal powers of the British Authorities.”

Later that year, Einstein also counselled fellow physicist Al Shadowitz to refuse to provide testimony at the McCarthy hearings—not by invoking the Fifth Amendment, but by asserting that the questioning was in violation of the First Amendment.

However, Einstein’s sociopolitical views were considered “verboten” by the American authorities for some time after his death as Cold War fervour and lingering McCarthyism maintained their hold on the nation. American society was reduced to frantic demonstrations of flag saluting and loyalty pledges. In this milieu, Einstein’s more rational pleas for world government and democratic socialism fell largely on deaf ears. During this era, it was unsafe to hold such political views; many were imprisoned and even more lost their jobs. Some of the victims of this purge were homosexuals, as somehow right-wing logic understood that ‘sexual perverts’ are by nature politically subversive.

Wikipedia describes some of the more shameful persecutions of this era (4):

It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.  Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees did in fact have a past or present connection of some kind with the Communist Party. But for the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous. After the extremely damaging "Cambridge Five" spy scandal (Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, et al.), suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. The hunt for "sexual perverts", who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in thousands being harassed and denied employment. Many have termed this aspect of McCarthyism "The Lavender Scare".^[

Einstein himself was in danger. For the last 23 years of his life, the FBI amassed a 1,427-page file on him and colluded with the Department of Immigration to bring deportation proceedings against him.  The New York Times reported on this bizarre episode of official paranoia regarding Einstein (5):

For many years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies spied on him, acting on suspicions as disturbing as a tip that he had been a Russian spy in Berlin; as vague as an unease with his support of civil rights and pacifist and socialist causes; and as goofy as claims that he was working on a death ray or that he was heading a Communist conspiracy to take over Hollywood.

America did not fully emerge from this wave of fanaticism until a younger generation began questioning the contradictions between the officially espoused notions of liberty, freedom, and equality on the one hand and the reality of segregationist laws making second-class citizens of Blacks on the other. A little later in that decade this same generation of Americans also protested the actions of their country (the so-called champion of revolutionary and anti-colonial movements) in subjugating the Vietnamese and in the process causing the death of between 1.5 and 3.6 million south-east Asians (6).

 

 

American cities burned, and the ideals of the counter-culture emerged to become a major influence in the culture’s evolution. Environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, and anti-racism enjoyed a rebirth during this period and have since become more or less accepted standards of American society.  This new generation dealt the final death blow to McCarthyism when Jerry Rubin and his Yippee collaborators appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in revolutionary garb complete with toy assault rifles. The jig was up; the ridiculousness of McCarthyism suddenly became clear, the Emperor had no clothes.

Figure 4 : Jerry Rubin and the Yippies demonstrated that the House of Un-American Activities Committee was a sham and a laughing stock.

Perhaps some of the headiest aspirations of this movement were encapsulated in the near saintly status bestowed upon the great musical prophet John Lennon. The lyrics to ‘Give Peace a Chance’ were chanted at many mass demonstrations against America’s war machine.

Figure 5: Lennon's Give Peace A Chance campaign was an integral part of the American anti-Vietnam war movement.

Just as the FBI had sought to quell Einstein’s influence through deportation, they used the same strategy to counter the huge popularity of John Lennon’s radicalism. A file was maintained on him that was used by the Nixon administration to initiate deportation hearings. In many ways, it is understandable that the FBI saw both these men in a similar light, for Lennon’s political idealism and demands for social justice are a close reincarnation of Einstein’s views.

Perhaps the principles of the counter-culture achieved their most direct and poetic expression in Lennon’s song Imagine.  Those lyrics envision an ideal world, a world with no religion, no nations, no possessions, no greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man. They describe a world very much like the one advocated by Einstein.

However, Einstein’s radical societal views were set forth in his usual logical manner which tended to lack the poetic punch achieved by Lennon. Nevertheless, his vision, while perhaps more thoughtful, was equally humanitarian and cosmic.HoHoH

Lennon’s lyrics start with an invocation to imagine a world with no religion.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…..

Likewise, the religion advocated by Einstein was the religion of Spinoza and did not envision heaven or hell nor any type of personal God.

Perhaps of greater interest is Lennon’s dream that instead of living our lives in the hope of a better life after death, it is best to focus on the lives we have now, here on earth. This notion of the value of life is central to the philosophy of Humanism. Wikipedia describes it (7):

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated, according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it.  Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress. In modern times, humanist movements are typically aligned with secularism, and today "Humanism" typically refers to a non-theistic life stance centred on human agency, and looking to science instead of religious dogma in order to understand the world.

Einstein fully endorsed Humanism and lent his great influence to promote humanist organizations. His dedication to this movement is documented in the Wikipedia article on Einstein’s religious beliefs (8):

Einstein was a Humanist and a supporter of the Ethical Culture movement. He served on the advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York. …. He was an honorary associate of the British Humanist organization, the Rationalist Press Association and its journal was among the items present on his desk at his death.

Clearly, Einstein and Lennon were kindred spirits in their views concerning religion and humanism.

The second verse of Imagine envisions a future where war is obsolete, where the main causes of war, nationalistic fervour, and religious belief, have been left behind.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

Many of Einstein’s writings echo these sentiments to a surprising degree. He recognized nationalism as a great evil and advocated for a world government as the only possible means of avoiding future wars (9).

Einstein was plagued throughout his life by religious believers who thought that given his spiritual nature he must believe in a religion similar to their own and in 1954, shortly before his death, he wrote to an offending Rabbi, spelling out in the clearest possible terms, his non-belief in conventional religions (10).

For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.

Imagine’s chorus stresses human agency, especially the possibility that humanity could choose a cooperative and peaceful world society.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

This same vision of a world society was shared by Einstein (9):

The UN and world government eventually must serve one single goal – the guarantee of the security, tranquility, and the welfare of all mankind.

The last verse of Imagine is considered by many to be it's most radical. In a few lines, Lennon outlines a society that has out-grown competition and has endorsed sharing.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

Lennon’s socialist vision is close to the democratic socialism advocated by Einstein (9).

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals…. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Einstein was not naive, he had a sophisticated view of socialism and acknowledged the many potential problems entailed with centralized bureaucracy:

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of the bureaucracy be assured?

Nevertheless, for Einstein, these problems were not ‘show stoppers’ but rather obstacles to be overcome on the path to a cooperative and sharing world society, a world society very much like the one John Lennon envisioned thirty years later.

Bibliography

1. A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences. Gintis, Herbert. s.l. : http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/FrameworkForUnificationOfBehavioralSciences.HGintis2007.pdf, 2007, BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES.

2. Einstein, Albert. Letter to Paul Langevin. 1933.

3. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American HIstory. Albert Einstein on the McCarthy hearings and the Fifth Amendment, 1953. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American HIstory. [Online] [Cited: 1 10, 2016.] http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/fifties/resources/albert-einstein-mccarthy-hearings-and-fifth-amendment-1953.

4. Wikipedia. McCarthyism. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarthyism.

5. Overbye, Dennis. New Details Emerge From the Einstein Files; How the F.B.I. Tracked His Phone Calls and His Trash. The New York Times. May 7, 2002.

6. Wikipedia. Vietnam war causalties. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties.

7. —. Humanism. Wikipedia. [Online]

8. —. Religious View of Albert Einstein. Wikipedia. [Online] [Cited: April 9, 2015.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Einstein.

9. Einstein, Albert. Essays in Humanism . s.l. : Philosophical Library/Open Road , 2011.

10. —. Letter written to Eric Gutkind . 1954.

11. —. Letter written to Raymond Benenson. January 31, 1946. Vols. Einstein Archives 56-505.

12. —. Letter written to Margot Einstein. 1951.

13. —. Letter written to Ugo Onofri. 1954. Einstein Archives 60-758.

The Price Equation and the Evolving Universe

John O. Campbell

 

This post is an early draft of an article published as Universal Darwinism as a process of Bayesian inference.

Although Darwin must be counted amongst history’s foremost scientific geniuses he had very little talent for mathematics. His theory of natural selection was developed in great detail with many compelling examples but without a mathematical framework. Mathematics composed only a small part of his Cambridge education and in his autobiography he wrote:

I attempted mathematics, and even went during the summer of 1828 with a private tutor (a very dull man) to Barmouth, but I got on very slowly. The work was repugnant to me, chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra. This impatience was very foolish, and in after years I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.

Generally mathematics are an aid to scientific theories because a theory whose basics are described through mathematical relationships can be expanded into a larger network of predictive implications and the entirety of the expanded theory subjected to the test of evidence. As a bonus any interpretation of the theory must also conform to this larger network of implications.

Natural selection describes the change in frequency or probability of biological traits over succeeding generations. One might suppose that a mathematical description complete with an insightful interpretation would be straightforward but even today this remains elusive. The current impasse involves conceptual difficulties arising from one of mathematics’ bitterest interpretational controversies.

That controversy is between the Bayesian and the Frequentist interpretations of probability theory. Frequentists assume probability or frequency to be a natural propensity of nature. For instance the fact that each face of a dice will land with 1/6 probability is understood by frequentists to be a physical property of the dice. On the other hand Bayesians understand that humans assign probabilities to hypotheses on the basis of the knowledge they have, thus the probability of each side of a dice is 1/6 because the observer has no knowledge which would favour one face over the other; the only way that no face is favoured is for each hypothesis to be assigned the same probability.

Frequentists have attacked the Bayesian interpretation of probability on the grounds that the knowledge which a particular person has is ‘subjective’ and that mathematics and science only deals with objective phenomena. Bayesians counter that their view is objective, as all observers with the same knowledge must assign the same probability. As the great Bayesian theoretician E.T. Jaynes put it (1):

In the theory we are developing, any probability assignment is necessarily “subjective" in the sense that it describes only a state of knowledge, and not anything that could be measured in a physical experiment. …. Now it was just the function of our interface desiderata to make these probability assignments completely “objective" in the sense that they are independent of the personality of the user. They are a means of describing (or what is the same thing, of encoding) the information given in the statement of a problem, independently of whatever personal feelings (hopes, fears, value judgments, etc.) you or I might have about the propositions involved. It is “objectivity" in this sense that is needed for a scientifically respectable theory of inference.

The Bayesian framework is arguably more comprehensive and has been developed into the mathematics of Bayesian inference, at the heart of which is Bayes’ theorem describing how probabilistic models gain knowledge and learn from evidence. In my opinion the major drawback of the Bayesian approach is its anthropomorphic reliance on human agency.

Despite the lack of mathematics in Darwin’s initial formulation of the theory it was not long before researchers began developing a mathematical framework describing natural selection. Perhaps the first step was taken by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. He developed numerous probabilistic techniques for describing the variance in natural traits as well as for natural selection in general. His conception of natural selection appears to have been curiously Bayesian although he may never have heard of Bayes' theorem. Evidence for his Bayesian bent is in the form of a visual aid which he built for a lecture given to the Royal Society.

He used this device as an aid to explain natural selection in probabilistic terms. It contains three compartments: a top one representing the frequency of traits in the parent population, a middle one representing the application of 'relative fitness' to this prior and a third representing the normalization of the resulting distribution in the child generation. Beads are loaded in the top compartment to represent the distribution in the parent generation and then are allowed to fall into the second compartment. The trick is in the second compartment where there is a vertical division in the shape of the relative fitness distribution. Some of the beads fall behind this division and are ‘wasted’; they do not survive and are removed from sight. The remaining beads represent the distribution of the 'survivors' in the child generation.

Galton’s device has recently been rediscovered and employed by Stephan Stigler and others in the statistics community as a visual aid, not of natural selection, but of Bayes' theorem. The top compartment represents the prior distribution, the middle one represents the application of the likelihood to the prior, and the third represents the normalization of the resulting distribution. The change between the initial distribution and the final one is due to the Bayesian update.

R.A. Fisher further developed the mathematics describing natural selection during the 1920s and 1930s. He applied statistical methods to the analysis of natural selection via Mendelian genetics and arrived at the fundamental theorem of natural selection which states (2):

the rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.

Fisher was a fierce critic of the Bayesian interpretation which he considered subjective. Instead he pioneered and made many advances with the frequentist interpretation.

The next major development in the mathematics of natural selection came in 1970 with the publication of the Price equation which built on the fundamental theorem of natural selection. As Wikipedia describes it (3):

Price developed a new interpretation of Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, the Price equation, which has now been accepted as the best interpretation of a formerly enigmatic result.

Although the Price equation fully describes evolutionary change, its meaning has only recently begun to be unravelled, chiefly by Stephen A. Frank in a series of papers spanning the last couple of decades. Frank’s insights into the meaning of the Price equation culminated in his 2012 paper (4) which derives a description of natural selection using the mathematics of information theory.

In my opinion this paper represents a huge advance in the understanding of evolutionary change as it shifts interpretation from the objective statistical description of frequentist probability to an interpretation in terms of Bayesian inference. Unfortunately Frank does not share my appreciation of his accomplishment. Instead he seems to take it for granted, in the frequentist tradition, that a Bayesian interpretation is not useful. While he understands that his mathematics are very close to those of Bayesian inference he is unable to endorse a Bayesian interpretation of his results.

However the mathematics of information theory and Bayesian probability are joined at the hip as their basic definitions are in terms of one another. Information theory begins with a definition of information in terms of probability:

Here we may view h_i  as the i^th hypothesis in a mutually exclusive and exhaustive family of competing hypothesis composing a model. I is the information gained by the model on learning that hypothesis h_i is true. P is the probability which had previously been assigned by the model that the hypothesis h_i is true. Thus information is ‘surprise’; the less likely a model initially considered a hypothesis that turns out to be the case, the more surprise it experiences, the more information it receives.

Thus information theory, starting with the very definition of information, is aligned with the Bayesian interpretation of probability; information is ‘surprise’ or the gap between an existing state of knowledge and a new state of knowledge gained through receiving new information or evidence.

The 'expected' information contained by the model composed of the distribution of the p_i is the entropy.

​​Bayes' theorem follows directly from the axioms of probability theory and may be understood as the implication which new evidence or information holds for the model described by the distribution of the p_i. This theorem states that on the reception of new information (I) by the model (H) the probability of each component hypothesis (h_i) making up the model must be updated according to:

Where X is the information we had prior to receiving the new evidence or information I. Bayesian inference is commonly understood as any process which employs Bayes’ theorem to accumulate evidence based knowledge. As Wikipedia puts it (5):

Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as evidence is acquired.

Thus we see that, contrary to Frank’s view, Bayesian inference and information theory have the same logical structure. However it is instructive to follow Frank’s development of the mathematics of evolutionary change in terms of information theory while keeping his explicit denial of its relationship to Bayesian inference in mind. Frank begins his unpacking of Prices equation by describing the ‘simple model’ he will develop:

A simple model starts with n different types of individuals. The frequency of each type is q_i. Each type has w_i offspring, where w expresses fitness. In the simplest case, each type is a clone producing w_i copies of itself in each round of reproduction. The frequency of each type after selection is

                            

​Where ​  is the average fitness of the trait in the population. The summation is over all of the n different types indexed by the i subscripts.

Equation (1) is clearly an instance of a Bayesian update where the new evidence or information is given in terms of relative fitness and thus the development of his simple model is in terms of Bayesian inference; I consider this to be neither an analogy nor a speculation.

While Frank acknowledges that there is an isomorphism between Bayes’ theorem and his simple model he cannot bring himself to admit that this means his simple model involves a Bayesian update and therefore describes a process of Bayesian inference. Instead he refers to the relationship between Bayes’ theorem and his model as an analogy:

Part of the problem is that the analogy, as currently developed, provides little more than a match of labels between the theory of selection and Bayesian theory. As Harper (2010) shows, if one begins with the replicator equation (eqn 1), then one can label the set {qi} as the initial (prior) population,  as the new information through differential fitness and { } as the updated (posterior) population.

Frank refers to Bayesian inference at many further points in his paper and even devotes a box to a discussion of it. In the process he gives a very coherent account of natural selection in terms of Bayesian inference:

The Bayesian process makes an obvious analogy with selection. The initial population encodes predictions about the fit of characters to the environment. Selection through differential fitness provides new information. The updated population combines the prior information in the initial population with the new information from selection to improve the fit of the new population to the environment.

Perhaps he considers it only an analogy because he doesn't realize that his 'simple model' is in fact an instance of Bayes' theorem. He makes the somewhat dismissive remark:

I am sure this Bayesian analogy has been noted many times. But it has never developed into a coherent framework that has contributed significantly to understanding selection.

On the contrary, I would suggest that Frank’s paper itself develops a coherent framework for natural selection in terms of Bayesian inference.

He concludes his paper with the derivation of:

J= B_mw V_w/w

On the right hand side of this equation are statistical variables describing selection. On the left is Jeffreys’ divergence. (Jeffrey, in the course of his geophysical research, had led the Bayesian revival during the 1930s.) Frank acknowledges that Jeffreys’ divergence was discovered and used by Jeffreys in his development of Bayesian inference:

Jeffreys (1946) divergence first appeared in an attempt to derive prior distributions for use in Bayesian analysis rather than as the sort of divergence used in this article.

Frank believes that his article is an analysis in terms of frequentist probability and information theory and he can therefore assert that Jeffreys’ divergence is not to be understood in terms of Bayesian analysis. He contends that his analysis relates the statistics of evolutionary change to information theory.

Equation 30 shows the equivalence between the expression of information gain and the expression of it in terms of statistical quantities. There is nothing in the mathematics to favour either an information interpretation or a statistical interpretation.

Frank puts himself in the awkward position of admitting that his description of evolutionary change utilizes the mathematics of Bayesian inference while at the same time denying that evolutionary change can be interpreted as a process of Bayesian inference. Why is he compelled to do this?

Part of the reason may be due to the near tribal loyalty demanded within both the Bayesian and Frequentist camps. Frank, in the tradition of the mathematics of evolutionary change, is a frequentist and jumping ship is not easy. A more substantial reason may be due to a peculiarity, and I would suggest a flaw, in the Bayesian interpretation. The consensus Bayesian position is that probability theory describes only inferences made by humans. As E.T. Jaynes put it:

it is...the job of probability theory to describe human inferences at the level of epistemology.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which studies the nature and scope of knowledge. Since Plato the accepted definition of knowledge within epistemology has been ‘justified true belief’.  In the Bayesian interpretation ‘justified’ means justified by the evidence. ‘True belief’ is the degree of belief in a given hypothesis which is justified by the evidence; it is the probability that the hypothesis is true within the terms of the model. Thus knowledge is the probability, based on the evidence, that a given belief or model is true. I have proposed a technical definition of knowledge as 2^-S where S is the entropy of the model (6).

A perhaps interesting interpretation of this definition is that knowledge occurs within the confines of entropy or ignorance. For example, in a model composed of a family of 64 competing hypotheses where no evidence is available to decide amongst them, we would assign a probability of 1/64 to each hypothesis. The model has an entropy of 6 bits and has knowledge of 2^-6 = 1/64. Let’s say some evidence becomes available and the model’s entropy or ignorance is reduced to 3 bits. Then the knowledge of the updated model is 1/8, equivalent to the entropy of a model composed of only 8 competing hypotheses which is maximally ignorant, which has no available evidence. The effect which evidence has on the model is to increase its knowledge by reducing the scope of its ignorance.

Due to their anthropomorphic focus both the fields of epistemology and Bayesian inference deny themselves the option of commenting on the many sources of knowledge encountered in non-human realms of nature. They must deny some obviously true facts about the world such as that a bird ‘knows’ how to fly. Instead they equivocate that a bird has genetic and neural information which allows it to fly but must deny it the knowledge of flight. The notion that we are different from the rest of nature in that we have knowledge is, in my opinion, but an anti-Copernican conceit, an anthropomorphic attempt to claim a privileged position.

This is unfortunate because it forbids the application of Bayesian inference to phenomena other than models conceived by humans, it denies that knowledge may be accumulated in natural processes unconnected to human agency. Thus even though natural selection is clearly described in terms of the mathematics of Bayesian inference, neither Bayesians such as Jaynes nor frequentists such as Frank can acknowledge this fact due to another hard fact: natural selection is unconnected to human agency. In both their views this rule out it having a Bayesian interpretation.

Natural selection involves a 'natural' model rather than one conceived by humans. Biological knowledge is stored in biological structures, principally the genome, and the probabilities involved are frequencies, namely counts of the relative proportions of traits, such as alleles, in a population. The process of natural selection which updates these frequencies has nothing to do with human agency; in fact this process of knowledge accumulation operated quite efficiently for billions of years before the arrival of humans. How, then, should we interpret the mathematics of evolutionary change which clearly take the form of Bayesian inference but fall outside of the arena of Bayesian interpretation?

I believe that the way out of this conundrum is to simply acknowledge that in many cases inference is performed by non-human agents as in the case of natural selection. The genome may for instance be understood as an example of a non-human conceived model involving families of competing hypotheses in the form of competing alleles within the population. Such models are capable of accumulating evidence-based knowledge in a Bayesian manner. The evidence involved is simply the proportion of traits in ancestral generations which make it into succeeding generations. In other words, we just need to broaden Jaynes' definition of probability to include non-human agency in order to view natural selection in terms of Bayesian inference.

Bayesian probability, epistemology and science in general tend to draw a false distinction between the human and non-human realms of nature. In this view the human realm is replete with knowledge and thus infused with meaning, purpose and goals and the mathematical framework describing these knowledge-accumulating attributes is Bayesian inference. On the other hand the non-human realm is viewed as devoid of these attributes and thus Bayesian inference is considered inapplicable.

However if we recognize expanded instances, such as natural selection, in which nature accumulates knowledge then we may also recognize that Bayesian inference provides a suitable mathematical description. Evolutionary processes, as described by the mathematics of Bayesian inference, are those which accumulate knowledge.   Not just any arbitrary type of knowledge, but  that required for increased fitness, for increased chances of continued existence. Thus the mathematics imply purpose, meaning and goals, and thus provide legitimacy for Daniel Dennett’s interpretation of natural selection in those terms (7):

 If I could give a prize to the single best idea anybody ever had, I’d give it to Darwin—ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein, ahead of everybody else.  Why?  Because Darwin’s idea put together the two biggest worlds, the world of mechanism and material, and physical causes on the one hand (the lifeless world of matter) and the world of meaning, and purpose, and goals.  And those had seemed really just—an unbridgeable gap between them and he showed “no,” he showed how meaning and purposes could arise out of physical law, out of the workings of ultimately inanimate nature. And that’s just a stunning unification and opens up a tremendous vista for all inquiries, not just for biology, but for the relationship between the second law of thermodynamics and the existence of poetry.

If we allow an expanded scope to Bayesian inference we may view Dennett’s poetic interpretation of Darwinian processes as being supported by their most powerful mathematical formulation.

An important aspect of these mathematics is that they apply not only to natural selection but also to any generalized evolutionary processes where inherited traits change in frequencies between generations. As noted by the cosmologists Conlon and Gardner (8):

Specifically, Price’s equation of evolutionary genetics has generalized the concept of selection acting upon any substrate and, in principle, can be used to formalize the selection of universes as readily as the selection of biological organisms.

Given that the Price equation is a general mathematical framework for evolutionary change, its Bayesian interpretation allows us to consider all evolutionary change as due to the accumulation of evidence-based knowledge. So quantum theory (9), biology (10), neural-based behaviour (11) and culture (12) may all be understood in terms of such evolutionary processes. Thus a wide scope of subject matters may be unified within a single philosophical and mathematical framework.

Bibliography

1. Jaynes, Edwin T. Probability Theory: the logic of science. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003.

2. Fisher, R.A. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. s.l. : Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1930.

3. Wikipedia. George R. Price. Wikipedia. [Online] [Cited: September 30, 2015.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price.

4. Natural selection. V. How to read the fundamental equations of evolutionary change in terms of information theory. Frank, S.A. s.l. : Journal of Evolutionary Biology , 2012, Vols. 25:2377-2396.

5. Wikipedia. Bayesian Inference. Wikipedia. [Online] [Cited: September 26, 2015.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference.

6. Campbell, John O. Darwin Does Physics. s.l. : createspace, 2014.

7. Dennett, Daniel. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. 1995. ISBN-10: 068482471X.

8. Cosmological natural selection and the purpose of the universe. Conlon, Joseph and Andy, Gardner. 2013.

9. Quantum Darwinism. Zurek, Wojciech H. 2009, Nature Physics, vol. 5, pp. 181-188.

10. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. sixth edition. New York : The New American Library - 1958, 1872. pp. 391 -392.

11. Selectionist and evolutionary approaches to brain function: a critical appraisal. Fernando, Chrisantha, Szathmary, Eros and Husbands, Phil. s.l. : http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/philh/pubs/fncom-Fernandoetal2012.pdf, 2012, Computational Neuroscience.

12. Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. Mesoudi, Alex , Whiten, Andrew and Laland, Kevin N. . 2006, BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES.

13. A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences. Gintis, Herbert. s.l. : http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/FrameworkForUnificationOfBehavioralSciences.HGintis2007.pdf, 2007, BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES.

Quantum Darwinism

John O. Campbell

This is an edited excerpt from the book Darwin Does Physics.

Many quantum mysteries have recently been understood by including the effects of the quantum system’s environment as an integral part of explanations of its behaviour. That prior explanations, which attempted to treat quantum systems as isolated entities, led to a theory which, as Feynman famously noted, nobody understood is hardly surprising, We can only imagine how ridiculous a theory of biology would be that tried to described the multitude of adaptations displayed by organisms without references to their environments.

A 2014 review article by Maximilian Schlosshauer describes the historical unfolding of this breakthrough in quantum understanding (1):

It is a curious “historical accident" that the role of the environment in quantum mechanics was appreciated only relatively late. While one can find -for example, in Heisenberg's writings – a few early anticipatory remarks about the role of environmental interactions in the quantum-mechanical description of systems, it wasn't until the 1970s that the ubiquity and implications of environmental entanglement were realized by Zeh. It took another decade for the formalism of decoherence to be developed, chiefly by Zurek

Wojciech Zurek is widely recognized as a leader in our understanding of the nature of quantum interactions between a quantum system and its environment or of quantum decoherence. Zurek’s progress in developing his theory of quantum interactions may be broken into three steps centered on three new concepts:

1) Einselection describes the type of information which may be transferred between a quantum system and in its environment during a quantum interaction. Zurek demonstrated that only information in the form of the system’s ‘pointer states’ can survive transfer to the environment. These pointer states depend upon both the nature of the system and the component of its environment with which it will share information. Pointer states describe the few classical characteristics, such as the systems position or momentum, which is all that the environment can experience of the quantum system

2) Envariance assigns a probability to each of the possible packets of information which may be transferred. These packets correlate with measurement values and thus envariance may be use to predict the outcome of possible measurements. It is of interest that Zurek derived these probabilistic predictions from fundamental quantum axioms rather than following the tradition of including them as a separate axiom.
 
3) Quantum Darwinism describes the relative reproductive success which the different various transferred information packet achieve in their environments. Zurek has shown that it is the classical information described by einselection and envariance that achieves a high level of redundancy in the environment; other types of information have a low survival rate. Zurek considers that the high level of redundancy of classical information provides classical reality with its objective nature; numerous observers will agree on the nature of reality as they have access only to a common and highly redundant but limited pool of information.

Together these concepts describe quantum interactions in terms of a Darwinian process and I will refer to all three as the process of quantum Darwinism. In each generation of information transfer just a small subset of information is able to survive and reproduce in its environment. This is deeply analogous to natural selection where in each generation of genetic information transfer just a small subset of the possibilities are able to survive and reproduce in their environments. 

Figure 1: Wojciech Zurek

It is perhaps shocking to many physicists that the central organizing principle of biology has been used to explain one of the most fundamental physical processes. Although Zurek’s technical description has been endorsed within consensus physics, its Darwinian implications have been shunned. If you Google ‘quantum Darwinism’ and ignore entries written by him or myself, you will be left with only meager comment. Zurek however is unequivocal concerning the Darwinian nature of his theory (2):

The aim of this paper is to show that the emergence of the classical reality can be viewed as a result of the emergence of the preferred states from within the quantum substrate thorough the Darwinian paradigm, once the survival of the fittest quantum states and selective proliferation of the information about them are properly taken into account.

In my view this conjunction of fundamental physical and biological explanations provides great hope for the unification of scientific understanding within a few overarching concepts such as universal Darwinism.

Quantum Darwinism provides a detailed description of a Darwinian process in terms of a single cycle, the evolution which occurs during a single generation. While the shift in probabilities between two generations may be the unit of evolutionary change it is the long term effects due to numerous repetitions of this cycle which produce the dramatic accomplishments of evolutionary systems.

To date the development of the theory of quantum Darwinism has focused on processes involved in a single cycle and has not yet paid much attention to the long term consequences produced by continual iterations over cosmic time. We should be careful to understand that generational succession in quantum Darwinism refers to the same phenotype, such as an atom, only at a later time and possibly under slightly different circumstances. In this regards it may be analogous to generations of single-celled asexual life where succeeding generations are not truly new individuals but may rather be considered as variations on the same individual with perhaps small changes in circumstance.

In a number of earlier sections I have repeated Zurek’s claim that ‘classical reality emerges from the quantum substrate’ but have not provided much explanation for that astounding assertion. The claim itself may seem somewhat metaphysical, as if classical reality arises as a kind of ephemeral vapor from a more fundamental quantum reality. With a better understanding of the mechanisms of quantum Darwinism, we are now prepared to discuss this dramatic claim.  

We might view the quantum substrate as a vast sea of quantum systems which can interact with each other only by way of the four fundamental forces – make that three if gravity is considered emergent from quantum forces. As each system can only receive information concerning any other system by way of these few forces, severe constraints are placed on the information which can be received. Zurek understands these constraints as a Darwinian selection mechanism which he describes within the theory of quantum Darwinism. ‘Classical’ information best survives the transfer to other quantum systems. Thus the information that one system may acquire of another is largely classical information. 

We should understand that this information is physical, it describes the only forces known to operate in the universe. Although these are quantum forces they are well described by Newton’s classical mechanics because the classical information, even though it describes only a small subset of the quantum substrate is all that is available, all that passes through the Darwinian selection mechanism. This information obeys classical logic and the mathematics of probability theory which we consider forms of common sense. It is insufficient to fully describe the quantum reality; that really is weird and seems to operate as described by other forms of mathematics that do not jibe with common sense.

Crucially, the information which can survive the transfer entails all that one entity can feel, understand or react to concerning another entity. In other words the ability of any entity to detect the outside world is largely restricted to the classical characteristics of that world. Thus classical reality emerges from the quantum substrate. 

Both the logic we are familiar with and the physical nature of our reality are explained as due to a Darwinian selection mechanism which regulates the flow of information between entities. The universe is not static. On the reception of information entities often react with an acceleration, broadly as described by the classical theories of Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s electro-magnetism and the theories of special and general relativity.  These are the forces and logic which defines our classical reality. They are also the forces which powered the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang onward. 

Zurek’s theory implies that this evolution should be understood as the operation of a Darwinian process. Each generation of information exchanged by quantum systems is selected on the basis of its reproductive success and earlier physical forms are distinguished from later ones by their relative ability to survive and reproduce. In this view we can understand the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang as a form of Darwinian evolution.

From the beginning the great power of natural selection was seen not so much in changes over a single generation, but rather in the cumulative effect of these changes over evolutionary history. Already in On the Origin of Species Darwin made the case that the many biological forms found in nature have evolved from a single ancestral individual through the process of natural selection. We might say that over evolutionary time genomes have successively probed the huge number of environmental circumstance in which they have found themselves for strategies of reproductive success and that new phenotypes have been successively constructed to fit those circumstances.

Zurek has described decoherence and quantum Darwinism as responsible for the transition from quantum to classical realities. In short classical reality is composed of an extremely small subset of quantum possibilities which are selected through a Darwinian process. In this view we must see the evolution of classical reality as originating in this same Darwinian process. Thus the history of the universe may be considered as shaped through the operation of quantum Darwinism.

In Zurek’s terminology ‘pointer states’ are those quantum states which may exist in classical reality. As he explains these states are defined by their ability to achieve reproductive success within their environments (3):

According to decoherence theory, the ability to withstand scrutiny of the environment defines pointer states. As I will discuss, the proliferation of records about those states throughout the environment is the essence of quantum Darwinism.

We often assume the physical evolution of the universe since the Big Bang to be a rather straight forward case of cause and effect; the continued expansion and cooling of the universe resulted in new forms and phenomena. The Wikipedia article on the Chronology of the Universe (4) provides many examples of this way of thinking including:

In the second phase, this quark–gluon plasma universe then cooled further, the current fundamental forces we know take their present forms through further symmetry breaking – notably the breaking of electroweak symmetry – and the full range of complex and composite particles we see around us today became possible, leading to a gravitationally dominated universe, the first neutral atoms (~ 80% hydrogen), and the cosmic microwave background radiation we can detect today.

Zurek’s theory suggests that this historical process may have been more nuanced. New physical forms may have emerged as the universe changed due to their ability to discover new environmental niches in which they could survive.

Within the scope of this theory we find a close analogy to natural selection. We might say that over evolutionary time quantum systems have successively probed the huge number of environmental circumstance in which they have found themselves for strategies of reproductive success and that new phenotypes have been successively constructed to fit those circumstances. If we understand ‘phenotype’, in this context, as the succession of physical forms, the physical evolution of the universe since the Big Bang may be understood in terms of a Darwinian process: Quantum Darwinism.

Bibliography

1. Schlosshauer, Maximilian. The quantum-to-classical transition and decoherence. [book auth.] M. Aspelmeyer, et al. Handbook of Quantum Information. 2014.

2. Zurek, Wojciech H. Quantum Darwinism and envariance. [book auth.] P. C. W. Davies, and C. H. Harper, eds. J. D. Barrow. Science and Ultimate Reality: From the Quantum to the Cosmos. s.l. : Cambridge University Press, 2004.

3. Quantum Darwinism, Classical Reality, and the randomness of quantum jumps. Zurek, Wojciech H. 2014, Physics Today, Vols. vol. 67, pp. 44-50 (2014).

4. Wikipedia. Chronology of the Universe. Wikipedia. [Online] [Cited: June 28, 2015.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe.