When I made that first post about Tyler Cowen’s monograph on marginalism – Tyler Cowen has thrown in the towel and is waiting for the machines to take over – I had no specific plays about writing a series of posts about and occasioned by the book. A day later, with a post, Marginalism is a Rank 4 idea, along with thermodynamics and biological evolution, I had decided that, yes, “it looks like I’ll be doing a series of posts about the book, though I can’t say how long that series will be.” But I had no intention of writing as many posts as I have, much less a spin-off working paper, On Method: Computational Compressibility in Complex Natural and Cultural Phenomena.
This post is itself like that. I figured it for two, maybe three thousand words, but possibly less. Instead it’s just grown and grown to over 8000 words (and I dropped a long appendix). There is a reason for that, which you can see in the title of that second post, where I assert that marginalism is a Rank 4 idea. That’s why this series of posts, and this post in particular, has grown. The objective in that second post was to situate marginalism in the context provided by the theory of cognitive evolution that David Hays began publishing in the 1990s starting with our basic paper, The Evolution of Cognition [1]. That’s where we set forth our basic conception that, over the long term, human culture has evolved through a series of architectures each grounded in specific informatic technology, starting with speech (Rank 1), writing (Rank 2), arithmetic calculation (Rank 3), and computation (Rank 4).
On the one hand, since I cannot assume familiarity with those ideas, I have to spend time developing some conceptual apparatus. At the same time I have the opportunity to extent the range of examples Hays and I have subjected to analysis with those ideas. That’s what I’m doing in this post.
In his Chapter 3, Cowen he has remarks about various pinnacles of human achievement, including two moments in the history of biological thinking, the emergence of modern taxonomy in the work of Carolus Linnaeus in the 18th century and the theory of evolution, by Charles Darwin, in the 19th century. I will argue that they represent Rank 3 and Rank 4 cognition, respectively. But I want to start with Rank 1 ethnobiology followed by the Rank 2 ordering of the biological world into a structure that has come to be know as the Great Chain of Being (in the West). This will give us the opportunity to follow one conceptual arena through the four cognitive ranks. Doing that, however, requires developing more conceptual apparatus than I had originally anticipated.
I want to start with how Cowen frames his treatments of botanical classification and evolution and then present some basic conceptual apparatus about processes of perception and cognition. Once those preliminaries have been taken care of we can take a look at the ethnological work on biological classification in Rank 1 (preliterate) cultures. Then we work our way through the other three ranks, commenting on Cowen’s remarks in connection with Ranks 3 and 4, and conclude with some further remarks about Cowen’s peculiar framing.
Cowen’s Framing
There are three aspects to how Cowen frames his various examples, starting, of course with marginalism: lateness, obviousness, and seeing around a corner.
Marginalism is late (p. 57):
To better understand the Marginal Revolution, we need to ask some fundamental questions about economics as a science. In particular, why did it take so long for economic reasoning to develop? I don’t even mean as a full, literal science, replete with advanced econometric methods, but simply as a general conceptual toolbox for intelligent people. The lateness of the Marginal Revolution is part of a broader story about the lateness of economic reasoning more generally.
Later (p. 59):
So I don’t think progress in economics has been slow in general. It is right now coming off an incredible 130-year or so run. Progress in economics, however, was glacial from the time of the ancient Greeks to the late 19th century, with a noticeable burst in the 18th century as well, centered around Adam Smith.
Here he combines all three of factors, peering around corners, obviousness, and then lateness (p. 62-63):
There is no “brute force” method for obtaining fundamental economic insight. Rather, you need to peer around a corner and see something that the other people have not already seen. And once you see and grasp it, you cannot easily forget it, again reflecting the asymmetry of this path toward knowledge. So often I have heard economists make proclamations like: “Once you start thinking about the world in economic terms, you can no longer unsee those things.”
That is exactly correct, but it is truly hard to see them in the first place. In essence, I think economics was so late to develop because it was so hard to peer around its corners. To see supply and demand in their proper workings.
Economics developed late because it is difficult to see around corners where the obvious truths are waiting to be found.
Now we have botanical classification, which Cowen introduces under this heading (p. 65): “Botanical Classification as a Laggard Science.” Then:
The history of botany is a parallel example to that of economics. Some key insights of botany seem fairly intuitive, at least once you understand them, yet they took a long time to develop. [...]
He goes on to remark about how botanical classification should be obvious:
You might think “botany is so simple – all you have to do is to look at a bunch of plants and give them names in some coherent system. They should have mastered this in the Dark Ages!” Surely plants are around us all, and observing them does not require complex equipment such as telescopes.
Cowen frames Darwin’s account of evolution in the same way (p. 76):
Theories of evolution and natural selection also are intuitive once you understand them, and they seem virtually inescapable once you are willing to consider them seriously. Yet they are remarkably late in becoming part of general human knowledge, and indeed to this day, according to polls a significant percentage of Americans still do not accept those doctrines.
Cowen seems to have some idea of the “proper” tempo at which ideas unfold in history but he never offers an explicit account of what this tempo is based on. Rather, he just offers examples of earlier intellectual and cultural high points, e.g. Greek philosophy, geometry and mathematics, Velasquez, Shakespeare, and Bach (pp. 59-61), as if botanical classification could have been cracked in Euclid’s time. Are we to suppose that biological evolution could have been discovered no later than Shakespeare’s lifetime if only someone had peered around the proper corners?
Before moving on to biology, however, I want to lay out some conceptual equipment from cognitive science.
Two Modes of Thought
Decade after decade discussions of thought and perception have settled around an opposition which is expressed in various pairs of terms. I first encountered it as analog vs. digital. In present discussions of AI it presents as neural vs. symbolic. Perhaps the deepest version is the one Miriam Yevick used in 1975, holographic vs. sequential [2]. In a paper David Hays and I published about metaphor we contrasted physiognomic vs. propositional [3].
Most linguistic reasoning exhibits the digital/symbol/sequential/propositional aspect of the opposition. As for the other side of the opposition, the analog/neural/holographic/physiognomic side, I offer this paragraph from the metaphor article that Hays and I wrote:
Our sense of physiognomy, and our use of the term, come from Joseph Church (1966) who talks of the young child, not yet able to read, who can tell one record from another on the basis of the groove patterns on the records. Physiognomic recognition is holistic and analogic. A striking example of this is the “strange friend phenomenon”. You encounter a friend and notice there is something strange about her, but you don't exactly know what. You scrutinize her and finally realize that, e.g. she changed her hair style. Or perhaps you don't figure out what changed and instead must be told. The initial recognition depended on a holistic, a physiognomic representation, not one which explicitly builds a full image from parts and parts of parts. If this initial recognition depended on a scheme which built the whole from the parts then there would be no trouble in discovering what had changed. The part would be found immediately. It is not, it takes time.
A scheme in which the whole is recognized as a composition over an arrangement of parts would be on the other side of the opposition, the propositional side (or digital, symbolic, sequential depending on your intellectual taste).
The reason I say Yevick’s version is the deepest is because she presents it in the context of a mathematical proof. She argues, in effect, that the world contains simple objects and complex ones. Simple objects are most efficiently and accurately recognized by a propositional method (to use the term Hays and I used), while complex objects are most efficiently and accurately recognized holographically. Both are necessary.
I bring the matter up because the distinction is useful in understanding the sequence of biological conceptualizations we’re going to examine.
Rank 1: Ethnobiology and the problem of the unique beginner
Cognitive ethnologists have studied the ways in which preliterate peoples classify life forms [4, 5]. They find that in the regions where preliterate systems overlap modern taxonomy, they are agree on the structural relationships. But there is one anomaly. Preliterate cultures generally lack terms for what they call unique beginners. They’re have terms corresponding to our concepts of fish, snakes, birds, and beasts (i.e. four-legged fur-covered creatures with tails) and our concepts of tree, shrub, grass, and vine, but they lack terms for plant and animal, respectively. But, and this is important, they recognize the distinction between plants and animals by syntactic devices.
What does that mean? All animals can move under their own power; they can sense things (see, hear, smell, touch); they communicate through cries and calls. Plants don’t do any of those things. That means, for example, that animals can be subjects for verbs such as to run, to jump, to look, and to listen, but plants cannot. Similarly, both plants and animals can be subject for verbs such as to grow or to die, but inanimate objects (rocks, houses, bicycles, etc.) cannot. How is it possible to recognize systematic differences in the syntactic affordances of plants and animals without, however, having words to mark those two categories?
As far as I know, there is no accepted explanation for these observations. When I first read them I was incredulous, like Cowen is about the apparent lateness of a variety of ideas. The difference between plants and animals is obvious, no? Well no, not if we accept the ethnographic evidence. As I had no reason to doubt the evidence I was forced to come up with some explanation, if only to satisfy myself.
Here’s what I came up with. The ethnologists have also noted that ethnobiological classifications seem to be based on visual appearance. If we are willing to assume that basic visual classification is based on a physiognomic mechanism, then we can think of it like this:
Creatures having similar appearances are classified together. While fish, for example can be quite different from one another in appearance, any given fish will resemble another fish more than any fish resembles a bird, a snake or a beast. Similarly, any tree will resemble another tree (trunk below, roots in the ground, a large leafy structure above), more than any tree resembles a shrub (shrubs are smaller and the trunk is not nearly so distinct), a grass, or a vine. But what visual comparisons would force arbitrary examples of animals together in one class in distinction to arbitrary examples of plants in a contrasting class? Does it make sense to compare rats with trees, and trout with vines for classification purposes? Do trout and rats resemble one another more than either resembles a pine tree? Those comparisons don’t make sense. They’re distinctly odd.
