Darwin Among the Machines (4 page)

Those ten billion computers are not here yet, but the advance guard is settling in. Most are safely minding their own business, performing innocuous routines with no more intelligence than it takes to recalculate a spreadsheet, schedule a meeting, or adjust the ignition timing as you drive. Some are more visible than others, especially personal computers—microprocessors linked more or less intimately to the memories, intuitions, and decision-making abilities of individual human brains. Suddenly, with the convergence of the computer and telecommunications industries (not to mention the banking industry, which led the way) everything is being connected to everything else.

A circuit-switched communications network, in which real wires are switched to connect a flow of information between A and B, would
be swamped by the intractable combinatorics of millions of computers demanding random access to their collective address space at once. All the switches in the world could never keep up. But with packet-switched data communications, collective computation scales gracefully as the number of processors (both electronic and biological) grows. Thanks to “hot-potato” routing algorithms, individual messages—the raw material from which intelligence is formed—are broken into smaller pieces, told where they are going but not how to get there, and reassembled after finding their own way to the destination address. Consensual protocols, running on all the processors in the net, maintain the appearance of robust connections between all the elements at once. The resulting free market for information and computational resources determines which connection pathways will be strengthened and which languish or die out. By the introduction of packet switching on an epidemic scale, the computational landscape is infiltrated by virtual circuitry, cultivating a haphazard, dendritic architecture reminiscent more of nature's design than of our own. Rules are simple, results complex. Does this signal the emergence of intelligence or merely the intellect of a bamboo forest growing toward the light?

Network architecture appears entirely random—as does, by coincidence or by design, the initial wiring of our own brains. Randomness has its reasons, however. “An argument in favor of building a machine with initial randomness is that, if it is large enough, it will contain every network that will ever be required,” advised Irving J. Good, one of the pioneers of the Colossus, in a lecture on parallel processing given at IBM in 1958.
³⁷
Whether growing a brain or evolving a telecommunications system, this seems to be good advice.

Computers may never embody mind at the level of human beings, despite a resurgence of such predictions every few years. But it is differences that make symbiotic relationships work. Symbiosis implies cooperation between distinguishable organisms, often a competition between host and parasite from which fruitful coexistence evolves. New and less distinguishable coalitions, such as lichens or eukaryotic cells, may be formed. “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking,” observed Lynn Margulis, describing how life evolved from the exchange of information between primitive chemical microprocessors the first time around.
³⁸
Life began at least once and has been exploring its alternatives ever since. The cooperation between human beings and microprocessors is unprecedented, not in kind, but in suddenness and scale.

Front simple congregations of simple molecules life moved, against all odds, to complex associations of complex molecules, forming a prolific molecular ecology eventually leading to living cells. Simple organisms were then established by associations of simple cells, followed by increasingly complex and differentiated cells forming increasingly complex and differentiated living forms. The social insects evolved elementary but highly successful collective organisms based on the behavior of individually simple parts, as Hobbes's
Leviathan
introduced the idea of an enduring collective organism composed of our own exceedingly complicated selves. And now, in the coalescence of electronics and biology, we are forming a complex collective organism composed of individual intelligences—governed not at the speed of Parliament but at the speed of light.

Is this the end of nature? Not by any means! Just as J. D. Bernal observed that “we are still too close to the birth of the universe to be certain about its death,”
³⁹
so we are still too close to the beginning of nature (not to mention the beginning of science) to be certain about its end. As Hobbes's Leviathan sparked debate over the divine right of kings, so this new Leviathan signals an end to the illusion of technology as human beings exercising control over nature, rather than the other way around. The proliferation of microprocessors and the growth of distributed communications networks hold mysteries as deep as the origins of life, the source of our own intelligence, or the convergence of biology and technology toward a common language based on self-replicating strings of code. How can we imagine what comes next? As Loren Eiseley suggested concerning the possibility of life on other planets, in 1953, “It is as though nature had all possible, all unlikely worlds to make.”
⁴⁰

Among the unlikely worlds that nature has yet to finish is the one that we call home. “And in this hope I return to my interrupted Speculation of Bodies Naturall,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in the final paragraph of
Leviathan
, “wherein, (if God give me health to finish it,) I hope the Novelty will as much please, as in the Doctrine of this Artificiall Body it useth to offend.”
⁴¹

Nature, in her boundless affection for complexity, has begun to claim our creations as her own.

A
t the end of September 1859, a twenty-three-year-old Samuel Butler (1835–1902) sailed from England aboard the
Roman Emperor
, bound for Canterbury Settlement in New Zealand. The estranged son of Reverend Thomas Butler (rector of Langar, Nottinghamshire) and grandson of Dr. Samuel Butler (headmaster of Shrewsbury and bishop of Lichfield) was off to establish his independence as a sheep farmer in the New Zealand hills. Canterbury Settlement, founded by Church of England pilgrims granted title to “waste land in the middle island,” was barely nine years old. Butler was renouncing the position (in church or college) his father expected of him, although he did not renounce some £4,400 in family capital that followed him from home. This and a degree in classics from Cambridge were the young emigrant's chief resources. He made good on both accounts.

“The world begins to feel very small when one finds one can get half round it in three months,” wrote Butler during the voyage out.
²
On arrival at Port Lyttelton, near Christchurch, he purchased an experienced horse named Doctor, “a good river-horse, and very strong.” Together they explored the surrounding territory, taking up a run of country at the divided headwaters of the Rangitata River (the homestead was christened Mesopotamia accordingly), where Butler put up a hut, established several thousand sheep, and lived happily until selling out his eight thousand acres at a substantial profit in 1864. Butler took well to the adventures along the way. The fellowship and solitude he found among the remote sheep stations is portrayed within the pages of his
First Year in Canterbury Settlement
in textures that suggest a Cambridge don making the rounds of his fellows' rooms. “After proceeding some few miles further I came to a station,” he noted (13 February 1860) during his initial search for unclaimed territory, “where, though a perfect stranger, and at first (at some little distance) mistaken for a Maori, I was most kindly treated, and spent a very agreeable evening.”
³
In March, after an excursion “in the extreme back country, and, positively, right up to a glacier,” Butler and a fellow homesteader headed down from the hills: “We burnt the flats as we rode down, and made a smoke which was noticed between fifty and sixty miles off. I have seen no grander sight than the fire upon a country which has never before been burnt.”
⁴

New Zealand left its impression on Butler, and Butler left his impression on New Zealand. He adopted the landscape and antipodean character of the remote colony as the model for his
Erewhon; or, Over the Range
, a satirical novel set in an isolated valley whose inhabitants had turned back the clock so as to preclude the development of intelligence among machines. Published anonymously in 1872,
Erewhon
was greeted with immediate success. “The reviewers did not know but what the book might have been written by a somebody whom it might not turn out well to have cut up, and whom it might turn out very well to have praised,” Butler would later explain.
⁵
Unfortunately, “the demand fell off immediately on the announcement of my being the author,”
⁶
or, as Butler's friend and biographer Henry Festing Jones (1851–1928) put it, “as soon as
The Athenaeum
announced that
Erewhon
was by a nobody the demand fell 90 percent.”
⁷

Nonetheless,
Erewhon
made a name for Butler and provided the only measurable profit of his literary career, with 3,842 copies sold for a net gain of £69 3s. l0d. by his 1899 accounts.
⁸
Butler's father, who, according to H. F. Jones, “felt that success in this kind of literature was
even more to be deprecated than success in any kind of painting,”
⁹
refused to read
Erewhon
and claimed that the book's appearance precipitated Mrs. Butler's death. Yet the world of the Erewhonians and the futility of their attempted sanctuary from machines remains as enduring a landmark as the New Zealand valley that bears the imprint Mesopotamia to this day.

Butler possessed an ability to find what he wanted in the world and to create life's accessories as he wished. He enjoyed art, so he took up painting, with enough success to exhibit at the Royal Academy. In honor of Handel, he took up composing and wrote, with Henry Festing Jones, a Handelian oratorio (
Narcissus
, 1888) as well as an album of gavottes, minuets, and fugues (Novello & Co., 1885). He cut a legendary figure in the New Zealand bush. “I shall never forget the small dark man with the penetrating eyes,” remembered Sir Joshua Williams, “who took up a run at the back of beyond, carted a piano up there on a bullock dray, and passed his solitary evenings playing Bach's fugues; and who, when he emerged from his solitude and came down to Christchurch, was the most fascinating of companions.”
¹⁰
Robert Booth, who hired on with Butler during Mesopotamia's second year, remembered him as “a literary man, and his snug sitting-room was fitted with books and easy chairs—a piano also. . . . Butler, Cook, and I would repair to the sitting-room, and round a glorious fire smoked or read or listened to Butler's piano. It was the most civilised experience I had had of up-country life.”
¹¹

Erewhon
and all the books that followed (until
Erewhon Revisited
in 1901) were published at Butler's own expense. The success of his nonfiction was uneven at best. A secure reputation had to await his autobiographical, anti-Victorian novel,
The Way of all Flesh
, which Butler left unpublished lest his relatives take offense. This courtesy was not extended to anyone else. “I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong,” Butler proudly admitted.
¹²
His career was marked by a bitter dispute with Charles Darwin, precipitated by Darwin's failure to adequately credit the work of prior evolutionists, such as Georges Buffon (1707–1788), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), Patrick Matthew (1790–1874), Robert Chambers (1802–1871), and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), who, in addition to being Charles's paternal grandfather, originated many of Charles's evolutionary ideas. Butler's criticism of Darwin's incomplete acknowledgments escalated into a sustained attack on the foundations of Charles Darwinism itself.

The ensuing controversy consumed four volumes of Butler's writings and twenty years of his life. On the advice of Thomas
Huxley, Darwin withheld comment, although, as Butler pointed out, some thirty-six references to “my” theory in the first edition of
Origin of Species
were deleted from subsequent editions of the book. Butler suffered the consequences of publicly attacking an intellectual hero of his time. “Has Mivart bitten him and given him Darwinophobia?” asked Huxley in a letter sent to Darwin in 1880. “It's a horrid disease and I would kill any son of a [Huxley leaves out a word but inserts a sketch] I found running loose with it without mercy.”
¹³
The forces that Darwin and Huxley marshaled against their religious critics were directed against Butler's arguments as well—and with greater force, since Butler lacked institutional support.