Trial and Error
Why it’s not where ideas come from, but how we treat them that matters.
Whenever I come across an idea that seems to seamlessly cuts across two different fields as the underlying principle shared by both, I get a bit excited. To me it’s an intriguing sign that the idea has reach, unexpected reach. For an idea to have gone above and beyond whatever parochial problem it was originally invented to solve, tells me that I ought to take it pretty seriously.
The underlying idea I’m thinking of is how knowledge can only grow by trial and error. This is true whether it is biology or philosophy.
Evolution by natural selection is by itself a powerful explanation, and it is so deep and elegant and beautiful that it has no rival at all. It is the means by which genes are varied and selected, so that an organism has the minimum genetic knowledge necessary to allow it to survive just long enough for it to reproduce. To be clear, it’s in the form of genes, not the ideas we humans rely on, but it’s knowledge nonetheless. It starts with random mutations at the level of the gene somewhere in an organism. In most cases, the mutation is unhelpful because it doesn’t really add any survival value, and can even take away survival value. But in some rare cases, the mutation adds some extra survival value, enough for it to solve the problem of surviving long enough in a hostile environment, which include other rival organisms, for it to reproduce. The knowledge in that gene has thus been selected because it’s useful in the right way. Natural selection is trial and error applied to genetic knowledge.
Evolution by natural selection turns out to be a special case of Karl Popper’s theory of conjectures and refutations. A genetic mutation is the equivalent of a random, blind conjecture. And it’s the environment that is doing the refuting, so to speak, by selecting out the organisms with less useful genetic knowledge.
When we realise that the vast majority of conjectures and criticisms that we make as humans are neither random nor blind, it is easier to appreciate how far above nature we have risen. Our knowledge, which consists of ideas that have never been placed in our genes by evolution, is not only decoupled from the lives and deaths of people, but we have in fact gone further and are now reversing the would-be shorter lives of people born with genetic abnormalities that would otherwise make living a good life extremely difficult.
The reason it is called evolution by natural selection rather than natural variation, is because Darwin understood that the variation happens randomly and thus requires no explanation. Popper also understood that conjectures could come from anywhere, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, and therefore did not try to explain that aspect either. The reason that both Darwin and Popper were so successful in explaining the growth of knowledge in their respective fields, is because they alighted on the same answer: origin of the mutation or conjecture matters does not matter, but what does matter is how mutations and conjectures are treated once they are already present. The process that allows better knowledge to emerge in the next generation is natural selection, and the process that allows better ideas to emerge in the next cycle is good criticism.
Evolution by natural selection, and evolution by refutations, is what allows knowledge, whether in the form of genes or ideas, to become better at solving problems over time.