IP: EDGE 42 - CODE: George Dyson & John Brockman

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

"To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex
and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask
each other the questions they are asking themselves."


EDGE 42  -  June 13, 1998


http://www.edge.org


(8400 words)


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THE THIRD CULTURE
-------------------------------


CODE
George Dyson & John Brockman: A Dialogue


"The metaphor we haven't quite got to yet will come from molecular biology,
when we start to see the digital universe less as an electrical switching
network or giant computer and more as an environment swimming with
different levels of code."


----------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------


Judith Rich Harris on Frank Sulloway's "How Is Personality Formed?"
(http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sulloway/index.html)


In response to John Brockman's question about children without siblings,
Sulloway hypothesizes that "only children ought to be intermediate on many
personality traits" because "they are not being pushed by a younger sibling
into being particularly conscientious or aggressive; and they are not being
pushed by an elder sibling into being particularly daring or
unconventional." But he also says that only children ought to be more
variable because they "are free to occupy any niche." What Sulloway is
trying to explain here is the embarrassing fact-embarrassing not just to
him but to all believers in the nurture assumption-that only children do
not differ in any systematic way from children with siblings.


Marc D. Hauser and Jaron Lanier on Geoffrey Miller's "Sexual Selection and
the Mind" (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/miller/index.html)


(Hauser) ...evolutionary psychologists need to know more about the brain,
how it works, and the degree to which particular components of the brain
allow for plasticity. Perhaps the most revolutionary findings within
current neuroscience stem from work showing that even in adulthood, there
is considerable plasticity (see, for example, the elegant work by Mike
Merzenich on primates and rats, and the recent work by Ramachandran on
brain damaged human patients or phantom limb victims).


(Lanier) Miller hopes to create dialogs where there have been divisions
between disciplines.  But there is a glaring chasm that he does not
address.  In a great many fields of inquiry, including biology, there has
been a fascination for several decades with non-linear, chaotic systems, in
which small changes  cause effectively unpredictable results.  And yet the
human mind, which would seem to be the most apparent example of a such a
system available to us, is still often stuffed into linear models by
evolutionary psychologists.


--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
CODE
George Dyson & John Brockman: A Dialogue




CODE is an attempt to get at the big issues of the Microsoft-Justice
Department situation. George has a biological approach and I have my own
points to make. The original dialogue was recorded on May 10th while
driving from Connecticut to New York in a rainstorm. No one from inside the
Industry was in sight. George and I plan to continue the conversation.


-JB


-----


GEORGE DYSON is a leading authority in the field of Aleut-Russian kayaks,
and his work has been a subject of the PBS television show SCIENTIFIC
AMERICAN FRONTIERS. He is the author of BAIDARKA, and DARWIN AMONG THE
MACHINES.


--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
CODE


GEORGE DYSON:  Everybody is worrying about Microsoft, and I think they're
more or less missing the point. It's not whether a monopoly is good or bad,
or whether it's breaking some rules to merge the browser with the operating
system. Turning this into a political issue-Government versus Microsoft-is
diverting attention from something much more significant: the growth of
multi-cellular forms of organization on the Net. You have the same
code-Windows-running on all the chips, and when you merge the Browser with
that you get the same code running on all the chips, but also in
communication, the way the cells of a metazoan are in communication.  I
don't think it's something we CAN stop-nor is it necessarily something we
SHOULD stop. Nobody complains about UNIX. The development of multi-cellular
operating systems is a separate issue from the question of whether what
Microsoft does is fair or legal in a business sense.


JB:  Go back-first you mention the same code is running on all the chips...


DYSON:  Not all, but we're talking 80-90 percent.


JB:  Second you're talking about multi-cellular digital organisms.  How did
we get to where we are now?


DYSON:  The analogy with biological organisms is highly tenuous-as EDGE
readers will be flooding your inbox to point out. It's just the beginnings
of something, in a faintly metazoan sense. The operating system used to be
the system that operated a computer. Now it is becoming something else.
This all started with one computer, whichever one you choose, whether it
was ENIAC, or the computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, or the
machine in Manchester-you had one of these machines and it turns out it can
do very useful stuff.


JB:  Was David Farber involved in ENIAC?


DYSON:  No. But he's Alfred Moore professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, where ENIAC was built. He's carrying on the tradition-it's
like holding the Lucasian Chair.


JB: Back in the '60s none of us had ever seen a computer. I remember
leading a crew of artists to Harvard/MIT in '65-we went to see "the"
computer. It wasn't about computers at all. It was about communications.
Walter Rosenblith's field was sensory communications. Harold Edgerton was
an electrical engineer; A.K. Soloman was a biophysicist. I don't recall
meeting anyone who called himself a "computer scientist." Something
important was lost when we started talking about hardware.


DYSON: So these things immediately started to communicate, by cards and
paper tape and phone lines, nothing new or mysterious about that. But
what's happening at Microsoft-and elsewhere-is a coalescence towards the
complete communication of everything.  As Farber would tell you-if you read
his list, [IP, a mailing list that's a good way for someone outside the
industry to keep up]-there are moves afoot to get the same code-Windows, or
Windows CE, or Windows NT or whatever, not to mention underlying
protocols-running everywhere. Running on your desktop, running on your
network, running in your car, running in your toaster, running on the
credit card you have in your wallet-it's all going to run this same code.
And if it's not Windows it'll be something else. The thing is, it's
happening. Which is very much what's gone on in the world of biology. In
biology there is one operating system, and it's the one we're stuck
with-the DNA/RNA operating system. All living organisms, with very rare
exceptions, run that same system.  That's not necessarily a bad thing,
but...


JB:  So can I call this conversation "Life as an Operating System"?


DYSON:  Maybe, but then you'll offend the biologists who say, "Oh, but it's
much more complicated than that."


JB: "Life as an Operating System, Sort Of."


DYSON:  Or just "Operating System"-period. The power that Microsoft
represents goes far beyond what we can ever imagine.  Don't forget
money-not the Microsoft Money program but real money-represented digitally,
and incorporated into the operating system. It's inevitable. Most of the
hard stuff is already in place. Money is cross-platform information, in a
very powerful, fluid form. And a small percentage of it filters back to
Redmond. It's like an ant hill or a termite nest. The ants collect crumbs,
but the crumbs add up. You can take the view that it's dark and sinister,
or you can say it's the coming of Utopia or whatever. I don't really
advocate either position, I just think it needs to be treated as much more
serious than the business of an oil monopoly or something like that.


JB: More important than most of the players in the industry or justice
department realize. We become the tools we create. In 1965 John Cage handed
me a book to read. It was CYBERNETICS by Norbert Wiener. Then Marshall
McLuhan turned me on to THE MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION by Bell
Labs scientist Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, which began: "The word
communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the
procedures by which one mind may affect another." For Cage, mind had become
socialized. By inventing electric technology, we had externalized our
central nervous systems, and he wanted to tap into this by creating "a
global utilities network." (See Prologue to DIGERATI -
http://www.edge.org/prologue.html ].


DYSON: And that's exactly what happened. 1965 was the beginning of the
time-sharing revolution, when one computer could be shared by many users.
Now we have time-sharing turned inside out-when one user can be shared by
many computers. Microsoft's "Digital_Nervous_System" isn't some cybernetic
vision-it's a product with an advertising campaign.


JB: It's on the mark in a nineties kind of way. And the big issue has
nothing whatsoever to do with business, or government regulation. It's
about who we are and who we will become.


DYSON:  The question is, who does it belong to? We are all going to end up
owning computers, but will we all end up owning shares?


JB: Let's go back to ENIAC.


DYSON: OK. So you've got one computer alone that can be very powerful, but
when they're in communication they become more powerful.  It's the same way
that a colony of cells with no nervous system at all can become a starfish
or a sponge or something like that just simply by chemical communication.


JB:  By communication you're talking about a network such as the Internet?


DYSON:  Yes, but you have to have all sorts of other communication to make
an organism happen: chemical, hormonal, mechanical. We are still immersed
in the metaphor of fifty years ago, the computer as brain, the brain as
electrical network, etc. The metaphor we haven't quite got to yet will come
from molecular biology, when we start to see the digital universe less as
an electrical switching network or giant computer and more as an
environment swimming with different levels of code. How these increasingly
complex one-dimensional strings of code actually do things, interacting
with each other and with the three-dimensional world we live in, has more
in common with the code-string and protein-folding world of molecular
biology, where molecules interact with each other-and do things-by means of
templates, rather than by reference to some fault-intolerant system of
numerical address.


JB: There is no Internet-there is only a process. When you stop a process
to name it, it becomes dead. What we think of as the Internet is only a
measure of its effect.


DYSON:  Look at it from the point of view of the code itself, not the end
user sitting at a terminal, which is either a synapse to some other coded
process, or the means to some formalizable end. In ancient (computer) times
code would run, be executed, and be terminated, that was the end of it. On
the Internet code can keep moving around; it may escape termination by the
local CPU, and when it arrives at a terminal, that doesn't mean it stops.


JB:  How do you define "code"?


DYSON:  Sequences of instructions, or data, that form either patterns in
time or patterns in space. It's a very broad definition. For instance a
sequence that when decoded by your machine turns into a song that you make
copies of and thereby reproduce. When you write it to your disk it stops
being a pattern in time and becomes a pattern in space. Computers transform
patterns in time into patterns in space and back again, and they do it very
fast-that's the whole Turing machine concept, the ability to make
transformations between these two kinds of patterns, by formalizing a
relationship between bit-to-bit (coding) on tape, and moment-to-moment
(processing) in time. It's a symbiosis-the hardware doesn't make any sense
without the code, and the code wouldn't exist without the hardware.


JB:  Multi-cellular?


DYSON:  Danny Hillis has a good explanation of that-from when he started to
do massively parallel computing. There's two kinds-single instruction
multiple data, and multiple instruction multiple data. What you have in
biology is sort of single instruction-you have one seed, which is one
string of code, and then it divides and becomes all these different cells
that differentiate into things-from cells to individuals to species-and
they are all running this original mother code, but doing different things
with it. That's what Windows is trying to do, to become this one seed of
code that allows you to do all these different things-balance your check
book, play your games, do your income tax, and everything else. And of
course it has become bloated by trying to do all that. But then code in
biology is bloated as well-that's one thing we've learned. We thought DNA
must be so efficiently coded; but it's actually full of all this
redundancy, because molecules are cheap, and editing is expensive.


JB:  So you say that this is not just a monopoly such as an oil monopoly?


DYSON:  I think it's more serious.  Because it is infiltrating everything.


JB: There is an essential feedback process in which a technology relays
back signals telling us what to do/who we are. Government is out of this
feedback loop. Until only very recently no democratic populace, no
legislative body, ever voted for what kind of information it desires. We
didn't vote for the telephone, for the automobile, for printing, for
airplanes, for the birth control pill, for antibiotics, for television, for
xerography, for transistors, for space travel, for electricity. Governments
play catch-up in terms of legal code. The other role government plays is to
muscle in on the action and shake down the successful technologists. That's
what we're seeing happen today.


DYSON:  It's puzzling to me, as a historian, that government suddenly feels
left out. From the 1890 census (the origins of the punched card industry
and IBM), through the 1940s and 50s and right up into the 1990s, most of
the critical innovations in computing (time-sharing, packet switching,
HTML, etc.) were instigated by the government, or at least incubated with
government support.


JB: Right, and Buckminster Fuller and his colleague John McHale, rarely
missed an opportunity to note that current military technology has a way of
winding up in your dishwasher twenty years later.


But let's move on and talk about Jaron Lanier's thinking, i.e. that the
architecture of the operating system is becoming embedded for a thousand
years. Would you agree with that?


DYSON:  Yes. The Year 3000 Problem! And the issue of monoculture vs.
biodiversity in the software world. It has parallels with religion. Once
established, they tend to last a very long time. We live in a world with
many different religions, we've had some of the most vicious wars fought
over issues of religion, and we've had no end of government involvement in
religion. Yet we still have a world of diverse religions.  With operating
systems it looks like we may be losing that diversity.


JB:  And there have been quite a few up to now-Unix, etc.


DYSON:  But the growth now is favoring Windows and Windows NT. And in the
next generation those two are going to merge. And perhaps become much
larger than Microsoft is today.


JB: Is there something inherently sinister in this process? We both know a
lot of people at Microsoft. They're not at all sinister.


DYSON:  Which is why it's so wrong to treat this as simply a legal or
business conflict-it isn't. It's the incorporation, by one corporation, of
collective behavior that's moving at an unprecedented pace.


JB:  What does it mean?


DYSON:  I don't know. What's remarkable is that we're not going to have to
wait that long to find out. It used to be that you'd say "I sure wish I'd
be alive in a hundred years to see what happens"-if we live five more years
we're going to see what happens.


JB:  Is it going to be a good thing if and when there will be no Netscape?
You will be limited to accessing the universe of information through
Microsoft's eyes.


DYSON:  At the beginning, the browser and the operating system were
symbiotic bodies of code. But then one swallowed the other. That's probably
how we have the modern living cell, with all its embedded subsystems,
because free-living symbionts were absorbed into the cell. That's what's
happening with the browser, it's gone from being an outside symbiotic body
of code to something that's swallowed by the operating system and become
the nucleus of it.  It's a very sensible way to do it, just to be able to
browse everything, whether it's on your disk or on somebody else's. The
problem here is that Netscape got incorporated not by symbiosis but by
imitation, and people sense that somehow this isn't fair. (And then you
hear, "But who imitated Mosaic?")


JB: Any advice to the Justice Department?


DYSON:  Lay off this question of whether you can merge your browser and
your operating system and these other vague things-all they can possibly
lead to is being argued about in court for ten years. Send a bunch of
hard-nosed lawyers in there who understand business deals and can crack
down on some of the details-any number of smaller cases where Microsoft has
pushed their weight around-but not these big religious issues that can't be
solved.  Make sure they obey the absolute letter of the law.


JB:  What's a religious issue?


DYSON:  Well, the issue of whether Microsoft is a monopoly or not, or where
you draw the line between applications and operating systems. Those are
tough things to legally decide.  And can you really do anything if you
decide them?


JB: Are you saying that there's no point in breaking up Microsoft and
having an operating system company and an applications company that compete?


DYSON:  Right, because the only way you can break it up is by forcing some
larger government administrative structure upon it, so the cure is worse
than the disease. One thing we know about regulation is that it's very,
very slow, and it's usually about ten years behind. Microsoft may exercise
its power unwisely, but government inefficiency may be worse.


JB: The Justice department's involvement on the technological level is off
the mark. There are issues to consider that are more important than
Microsoft, Netscape, "the consumers", or today's economy. We don't need
Justice, Congress, the lawyers for this.


DYSON:  We need biologists. Molecular biologists and field biologists.
Entomologists. Immunologists. Viral geneticists-they can tell you how to
write (or evolve) robust code. As far as I know, there's almost no
biologists at Microsoft. Lots of physicists, and four-dimensional
topologists even, and of course Nathan's work with dinosaurs, but not much
else. Maybe they're keeping it quiet. It reminds me of Von Neumann's
computer group at the Institute in the 1950s-Charney's meteorology group
was a convenient smoke screen for all the calculations being done on
thermonuclear bombs. But the bombs were sort of an open secret. There was a
much deeper secret, however: Nils Barricelli's numerical symbioorganisms.
No one dared draw attention to that.


JB: Have you discussed this with Microsoft?


DYSON:  I was invited to visit Microsoft-and gave my pitch for software
evolution as a somewhat haphazard symbiogenetic process, and some of the
programmers seemed to take this as a criticism of their work. Programmers
write code, code doesn't self-evolve.


JB:  What was your pitch?


DYSON:  In nature, every possible variation of code is tried sooner or
later and nature selects what works.  You throw code at the universe and
see what grows.  That in a very crude sense is what I see happening at
Microsoft. There are 13,000 people, many of them writing code. Whole
divisions write code for a year and if it doesn't work and the market
doesn't buy it, it's dead-if it's something that works, if something's
successful, it grows. You throw money like grass seed in a park and watch
where the paths form. There are some very clever programmers but can anyone
predict ahead of time what's going to work?  I think it's much more an
element of chance. It's not random- you see the successful things because
they're the ones that get to market, but it doesn't take thousands of
people to write-even to write an operating system.


JB: How does it happen?


DYSON:  Systems grow by symbiosis.  Remember the System Development
Corporation, which was started in the early 1950s as a small subdivision of
RAND, to write operating systems for air defense. By the mid-1950s it had
grown to twice the size of the rest of RAND. Ashby's Law of Requisite
Variety says that effective control systems have to be at least as complex
as the systems they control. So you have to use components--and
hierarchical languages. No one could engineer something as complicated as
Windows 95 from scratch; it has to be built up from other autonomous things
that are known to work.  The code has a life of its own-it has to go out in
the world like biological code and do something, and then the response goes
back to the source and if it's successful it gets reproduced-or imitated,
which gives digital evolution a faintly Lamarckian quality that's absent in
the natural world.


JB:  Have you had this discussion with Charles Simonyi?


DYSON:  Only in snippets. His project on intentional programming is way
ahead of the curve. He's a mathematician, and he can think in more than two
or three dimensions. There's always a higher dimension than the one in
which you are writing the code. There's always another level-the language
above the language-and this IP-Intentional Programming
[http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p1.html]-project is a way of
opening a doorway so that something successful at one level can be extended
to the other levels without this incredibly laborious process. It becomes
less brittle. But it's not just another language. Languages form layers,
whereas IP, as I understand it, has depth.


JB: Software is the only business today.


DYSON:  In the 1930s it took a visionary to see this coming. Turing (and
Goedel) said that everything can be coded-people laughed and said, oh,
those romantic mathematicians are imagining this unreal stuff. In the 1940s
it started to happen.


JB: A notion that descended directly to the logic of BY THE LATE JOHN
BROCKMAN [http://www.edge.org/btljb/cover.html]. Everything's being coded.
And now, it's going to be coded through Windows.


DYSON:  Exactly. That's the amazing thing-technically Windows is just a
number. One very long number.  You buy Windows, it's on a compact disk,
it's just one long string of bits.  If you tried to type it out as a book,
you would be typing for a very long time.  In Turing's day this all seemed
ridiculously abstract-the idea that you could have some kind of universal
number, and here Windows is the idea of a universal number, carried to
reality and shrink-wrapped. If you took somebody 50 years ago and tried to
tell them this is going to happen in 50 years they wouldn't believe it.


JB:  But it's just a string of bits.


DYSON: Yes, it is. But let me remind you of something "which might interest
biologists more than artificial intelligencers," as logician John Myhill
put it in 1964. "The possibility of producing an infinite sequence of
varieties of descendants from a single program... suggests the possibility
of encoding a potentially infinite number of directions to posterity on a
finitely long chromosomal tape."


JB: Who owns the tape?


DYSON: Good question.


--------------------------------------------------
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THE REALITY CLUB


Judith Rich Harris on Frank Sulloway's "How Is Personality Formed?"
(http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sulloway/index.html)


Marc D. Hauser and Jaron Lanier on Geoffrey Miller's "Sexual Selection and
the Mind" (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/miller/index.html)




--------------------------------------------------
From: Judith Rich Harris
Submitted: 6.1.98


Comments on the Interview with Frank Sulloway, "How Is Personality Formed?"


Frank Sulloway is right when he says that a younger sibling would be ill
advised to punch his older brother in the nose: the punch might be
returned, and older kids punch harder than younger ones. But the same
younger sibling who learns through hard experience to stay his hand at home
may nonetheless become the bully of the playground, if he happens to be
larger or stronger than other children of his age. As I show in my
forthcoming book THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION, the strategies children work out
at home for getting along with their parents and siblings are likely to be
useless in the world outside their home. That is why children's behavior
differs systematically in different social contexts. And that is why
psychologists looking for birth order effects in modern populations have
again and again failed to find them.


It was different in the old days. In former times, children spent most of
the day in the company of their siblings, so a younger sibling might spend
his entire childhood in the shadow of an older brother. And the rule of
primogeniture meant that a child's birth order determined his status not
only within his family but in the society as a whole, from the cradle to
the grave.


Today, children interact with their siblings mainly at home. Outside the
home they spend most of their time in the company of same-age peers.
Developmental psychologists have looked for, and have not found, a
carryover of behavior from sibling relationships to relationships with
peers. Children who fight like cats and dogs with their siblings are not
more likely to have troubled peer relationships. A child who submits to an
older sibling at home may be a leader in her nursery school classroom.
Sure, children learn things at home. But they learn new things, different
things, when they go out. And it's what they learn Out There that they
carry with them to adulthood, because Out There is where they are destined
to spend the rest of their lives.


The idea that birth order has important and persistent effects on
personality has been repeatedly debunked by careful reviewers of the
data-reviewers without a theoretical ax of their own to grind. And yet
people go on believing in the power of birth order. I attribute the
persistence of this belief to what I call "the nurture assumption": the
assumption that what makes children turn out the way they do, aside from
their genes, is the way their parents bring them up. Since it is clear that
parents do not treat all their children alike, and equally clear that
firstborns are treated differently from laterborns (the oldest is given
more responsibility, the youngest more affection), the nurture assumption
predicts that order of birth should leave permanent marks on the children's
personalities. Only it doesn't-at least not in modern populations. Or if it
does, the effects are so small and unreliable that they are of no practical
importance. Birth order effects cannot, for example, explain the fact that
children reared in the same family do not turn out alike: at most they can
account for only a tiny fraction of the environmentally derived variation
in personality.


Sulloway is right that birth order is a "systematic source of differences
in family environments"; he is right that siblings have a tendency to
diversify. They may get interested in different things and choose different
careers. Their birth order unquestionably affects their relationships with
each other and with their parents; it affects the way they behave at home.
What it does not affect is their adult personality, measured outside the
home or judged by people who are not members of the family.


In his Edge interview, Sulloway gives the impression that self-report
personality tests-the kind where people answer questions about
themselves-are worthless and that the psychologists who construct them are
naive enough to take the subjects' statements about themselves at face
value. The truth is that personality tests are sophisticated devices that
have been honed and improved over time. They are examined for internal
consistency and checked against other sources of information; test items
that don't work are eliminated. No single item on the test can do the job
unaided; the scorers of these tests are looking for PATTERNS of responses.
The "Big Five personality dimensions" that Sulloway talks about are a
product of the same tests that he dismisses when they produce results not
to his liking.


Sulloway asks but one question of his historical subjects: Do they or don't
they believe in evolutionary theory, or phrenology, or the Protestant
Reformation? It's a test consisting of a single item. How well can we judge
someone's personality by his answer to a single question?


But Sulloway has more than historical data: he has modern data from a
variety of personality tests and measures. The data he uses for this
purpose were all collected before 1981: they are from studies reviewed in a
1983 book by the Swiss psychologists Cecile Ernst and Jules Angst (that's
right, Ernst and Angst-I'm not making this up). Ernst & Angst concluded
that most of the studies they reviewed were worthless because the
researchers had failed to control for family size and/or socioeconomic
class (variables that are themselves correlated). They threw out the
worthless studies, looked closely at the ones that remained, and concluded
that birth order was a crock. "This may signify," they said, "that most of
our opinions in the field of dynamic psychology may have to be revised."


Sulloway reexamined the same studies that Ernst & Angst reviewed-the ones
that used the proper controls-and came to different conclusions. There are
a number of problems, however, with his reexamination; I discuss them in
detail in Appendix 1 of THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION (due out in September). For
example, how many studies did Sulloway include in his reanalysis? Five
times in his book BORN TO REBEL, and three times in his Edge interview, he
gives the number of properly controlled studies as 196, but I spent days
combing through Ernst & Angst's book and found nowhere near that number.
The explanation of this discrepancy is contained in a note underneath a
table in BORN TO REBEL: "Each reported finding constitutes a `study.'"
Thus, if a researcher reported that the firstborns in a particular sample
of subjects were more conventional, conscientious, assertive, and neurotic
than the laterborns, Sulloway's definition allowed him to count these four
findings as four "studies." Only by counting some studies more than once
could Sulloway have obtained his total of 196. Although multiple findings
generated from the same sample of subjects are not statistically
independent, Sulloway nonetheless tested his data with a statistic based on
the assumption that each outcome is independent.


"Unfortunately," Sulloway says in his Edge interview, "most
psychologists-to this day-do not appreciate the issue of statistical
power." He is objecting to attempts to test his claims with samples of only
200 to 400 subjects. Well, if birth order effects were as big and important
as Sulloway implies, 200 to 400 subjects should be plenty to demonstrate
them. In any case, he has given the impression that bigger studies are more
likely than smaller ones to turn up significant birth order effects, which
is what you'd expect if birth order effects were real but small. Just the
opposite is true, however. Of the research reviewed by Ernst & Angst, only
19 percent of the findings from the largest studies (more than 400
subjects) were favorable to Sulloway's theory, versus 38 percent of the
findings from the smallest ones (fewer than 200). Sulloway calls his
reanalysis a "meta-analysis," but that term is usually used to describe a
procedure that takes into account the size of the included studies and the
magnitude of their effects. Neither sample size nor effect size was taken
into account in Sulloway's analysis.


The largest study I know of on birth order is the one carried out by Ernst
and Angst themselves. Not content to survey the work of others, they
decided to check up on their conclusions by running a massive study of
their own: 7,582 college-age residents of Zurich served as subjects. Ernst
& Angst used all the proper controls and measured (with a self-report
questionnaire) twelve different aspects of personality, including
Sulloway's favorite, openness. They found no significant birth order
effects at all among subjects from two-child families-no differences in
personality between the firstborn and the secondborn. Among subjects from
larger families there was one significant effect: the lastborn tested
slightly lower in masculinity. This study was reported in the same 1983
book that produced the data for Sulloway's reanalysis, but he does not
mention it either in Born to Rebel or in his interview on Edge.


Perhaps he discounted it because it used the self-report method. Studies
that use family members-parents or siblings-to assess the subjects'
personality are far more likely to produce findings favorable to Sulloway's
theory. Several such studies were included in Ernst & Angst's survey and
most of them yielded multiple findings. But are the findings valid? Ernst &
Angst didn't think so. When you ask people to assess the personality of
their children or siblings, what you get is a description of how the
subjects behave at home-how they behave with their parents and siblings.
This doesn't tell you much about how they behave at other times and in
other places. Parents' descriptions of their kids agree poorly with
teachers' judgments. (I imagine that teachers must get tired of hearing
parents ask, "Are you sure you're talking about MY kid?") A method Sulloway
advocates in his Edge interview is to have subjects compare themselves to
their siblings, but what that would give you is a picture of how the
siblings behave vis-a-vis each other-how they behave when they're together,
because they don't know how their sibling behaves when they're apart. I
have no doubt that such a procedure would generate birth order effects.


In response to John Brockman's question about children without siblings,
Sulloway hypothesizes that "only children ought to be intermediate on many
personality traits" because "they are not being pushed by a younger sibling
into being particularly conscientious or aggressive; and they are not being
pushed by an elder sibling into being particularly daring or
unconventional." But he also says that only children ought to be more
variable because they "are free to occupy any niche." What Sulloway is
trying to explain here is the embarrassing fact-embarrassing not just to
him but to all believers in the nurture assumption-that only children do
not differ in any systematic way from children with siblings. These
children have missed out on the experiences that play such an important
role in Sulloway's theory: they haven't had to compete with their siblings
for parental attention, and they haven't had to learn how to get along (or
not get along) with a bossy older sister or a pesky younger brother. And
yet their personalities are indistinguishable from those of children with
siblings.


Occasionally a study does turn up a difference between only children and
children with siblings, or between firstborns and laterborns, or between
first- and lastborns and middle children. Such results are a testimony to
the persistence with which researchers look for them and their refusal to
take no for an answer. The fun part comes in thinking up an explanation for
each significant effect that is found, because each study that produces a
publishable result tends to produce a different one. Sulloway mentions, for
example, a study that found that middle children were less likely than
first- or lastborns to identify themselves with a family label, presumably
because they were more closely identified with their peers. Sulloway's
explanation is that "middle children are at a disadvantage-they don't have
the benefit of being first, which leads to greater parental investment
because firstborns are closer to the age of reproduction. The lastborn has
the benefit of being the last child the parents are going to have, so
parents will tend to invest heavily in this child so that it will not die
in childhood." Ernst & Angst had something to say about this kind of
post-hoc reasoning and I think it's worth quoting here. The italics are
theirs.


     Birth order research seems very simple, since position in a
     sibship and sibship size are easily defined. The computer is
     fed some ordinal numbers, and then it is easy to find a
     plausible post hoc explanation for any significant difference
     in the related variables. If, for example, lastborn children
     report more anxiety than other birth ranks, it is because for
     many years they were the weakest in the family. If firstborns
     are found to be the most timid, it is because of incoherent
     treatment by an inexperienced mother. If, on the other hand,
     middle children show the greatest anxiety, it is because they
     have been neglected by their parents, being neither the first-
     nor the lastborn. With some imagination it is even possible to
     find explanations for greatest anxiety in a second girl of
     four, and so on, ad infinitum. THIS KIND OF RESEARCH IS A
     SHEER WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY.


-----


JUDITH RICH HARRIS is a writer and developmental psychologist; co-author of
THE CHILD: A CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF DEVELOPMENT; winner of  the 1997 George
A. Miller Award for an outstanding  article in general psychology, and
author  of the forthcoming THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION:  WHY CHILDREN TURN OUT
THE WAY THEY DO.


--------------------------------------------------
From: Marc D. Hauser
Submitted: 5.28.98


I would like to make just a few comments on the issues raised in your
interview and discussion with Geoffrey Miller.


First, I am completely sympathetic to the idea that there should be a
marriage between behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology.  Steve
Pinker is already doing this, using some of the intuitions derived from his
account of language and its funcitonal design features, together with twin
studies.


Second, although there is an important historical distinction to be drawn
between natural selection and sexual selection, and many behavioral
ecologists continue to draw on this distinction, once you break the problem
down into one focused on characters leading to fitness advantages (i.e.,
gene replication), the distinction really fades away. One looks at
variation, heritability and fitnesses consequences.


Third, although I am compelled by the arguments from evolutionary
psychology, there are two areas of research that would, I believe, help in
formulating hypotheses that are more atuned to mechanistic constraints. In
particular, evolutionary psychologists need to know more about the brain,
how it works, and the degree to which particular components of the brain
allow for plasticity. Perhaps the most revolutionary findings within
current neuroscience stem from work showing that even in adulthood, there
is considerable plasticity (see, for example, the elegant work by Mike
Merzenich on primates and rats, and the recent work by Ramachandran on
brain damaged human patients or phantom limb victims).


In addition, given the interest in a strong nativist stance, the recent
explosion of work on hox genes seems extremely relevant.  Given the fact
that many genes for segmentation are highly conserved, we must be very
cautious when we assess problems of homology and homoplasy, issues that
would appear to lie at the heart of the evolutionary psychologist's claims
for an EEA.


Marc


-----


MARC D. HAUSER is an Evolutionary psychologist; Professor of psychology,
anthropology and program in neuroscience at Harvard University; author of
THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION; and WHAT THE SERPENT SAID: HOW ANIMALS
THINK AND WHAT THEY THINK ABOUT (forthcoming).


--------------------------------------------------
From: Jaron Lanier
Submitted: 5.28.98


Let me first respond as a musician.  Darwin did not invent the idea that
attracting mates must have had something to do with the origins of music.
Listen to the "locker room" talk of musicians and you'll frequently hear
that theory articulated with hearty enthusiasm- and you can go back to a
variety of ancient sources (Hindu, Chinese, and many others) and find
approximations of the same.


Since it's very hard to define what is and is not music, I fear it's not an
easily  tested premise, but it is a welcome one.  I am usually among the
first to be offended by excessive reductionism in evolutionary theories of
human nature, but this is the sort of idea that sits well.  Of course music
is in part a "spin off" of sex!  I notice my own playing improve when women
are listening.  I suspect that effect is measurable and repeatable, and
might provide one avenue for experimentation.


As I read Miller's interview, the difference I find with him is that he
hopes to understand both music and sexual selection as more linear,
contained, and measurable phenomena than I believe them to be.


Miller hopes to create dialogs where there have been divisions between
disciplines.  But there is a glaring chasm that he does not address.  In a
great many fields of inquiry, including biology, there has been a
fascination for several decades with non-linear, chaotic systems, in which
small changes  cause effectively unpredictable results.  And yet the human
mind, which would seem to be the most apparent example of a such a system
available to us, is still often stuffed into linear models by evolutionary
psychologists.


Miller chooses the quality of intelligence to exemplify the practice of
evolutionary psychology, so I will also use it to illustrate some room for
difference in interpretation.


I fear there is an almost inevitable confusion of genetic traits (which are
initial conditions for a brain) and capabilities (which are non-linear
outcomes) in evolutionary psychology theories.  I usually explain this with
a metaphor to movie reviews.


It would be easy to come up with parameters to characterize and compare
movies.  One could speak of their budgets, the number of days in filming,
the number of people involved in the production, and so forth.  One could
also find legitimate correspondences between these values.  A movie
production that makes use of a huge staff is likely to also require more
days of shooting, for instance.  It also possible to statistically link
these parameters very approximately to the financial success of a movie.
Analysts find that the most expensive and cheap movies are in general more
likely to turn a profit, while mid range budget movies are more likely to
lose money.


So far so good.  But these and other available measurements (such as focus
groups) don't help much in predicting the success of an individual movie.
"Titanic" was expected to be a flop, while "Godzilla" has turned out to be
something of a disappointment.  When it comes to judging the quality of a
movie, as opposed to its market success, we can also find some general
correlation between the various critics.  If Siskel and Ebert both hate a
movie, it's more likely the New Yorker reviewer will also hate it.  But
what is important is that in judging the overall quality of a movie,
reviewers only suggest values with very low precision.  Siskel and Ebert
provide 2 bits of information (thumbs up, thumbs-down), while other
reviewers might offer a 4 or 5 star system, or, rarely, a ten star system.
The measurements that can be made of a movie's production are much more
precise than the evaluations of the "desirability" of the outcome, and can
only be imprecisely correlated with precisely measurable outcomes, like
profitability.


This all seems intuitive, yet when it comes to the human mind, an object of
greater complexity, subtlety, and mystery than a movie, theorists are
liable to confuse themselves by creating specious accuracy and
correspondence.


There is a "G factor", and it is rather like the correspondence between a
movies budget and its staff size and the number of screens on which it will
open.  This is a value that can be known to significant precision.  There
is also "intelligence" in the word's common usage and it is rather like a
movie review rating.  What I suspect, though, is that there is not a
measure of overall quality of intellect or intelligence that is as accurate
as G, and yet somehow psychologists uncritically assume that there is. Even
worse, educators, employers, and parents are given no warning that there
might be an illusion of specious accuracy in a testing system that directly
effects the outcomes of individual lives.


Movie investors, and all of us, repeatedly fall prey to the illusion of
linearity in non-linear systems.  We still believe we can say someone with
110 IQ is ten points smarter than someone else with a 120 IQ, and studios
still believe they can predict how much money a movie will make.  Without
this madness it is possible that movies would not be made, but science and
parenting should try to rise above illusion.


(By the way, while I'm sure I have a G factor, I don't have an IQ- I have
refused the tests since I was a child- filling them in randomly when forced
to take them.)


While it is essential to explore the biological origins and constraints of
human nature, it is ever more important to reaffirm that people cannot be
entirely understood by those constraints.


The easiest way to demonstrate this is to point out that the advent of
writing and civilization occurred during a period of practical genetic
stasis.  The human brain is clearly genetically capable of achievements
which could not have been foreseen by the process of sexual selection, or
any form of evolutionary pressure.  Human traits have played out in
unpredictable ways.  This is almost too obvious a thing to state in so many
words, and yet I feel a need to repeat it when I read the works of
contemporary evolutionary psychology.


This is also the reason why it DOES make sense for Gould and others to
treat humans as a special case, to some degree.


The joy of music is that it becomes more than we can account for, just like
a brain or a movie.  Yes, "Music is a system of basic elements, notes, that
are combined according to certain principals of rhythm, tonality", but
musical behavior is capable of extraordinary, non-linear flights of ecstasy
and genius.


The illusion of linearity is demonstrated when Miller says, "It's going to
be difficult for people to cope with ideas that there are just a few
measures that can describe-not just their intelligence but their
personalities."  Indeed it should be difficult.


There is such a terrible danger of people confusing the squalid
measurements of their parts with the demonstrated, non-linear grandeur of
the potential of their whole.


I teach sometimes, and I will always consider it to be malpractice if I
"relax" as Miller suggests, and ignore the possibility that genius might
yet emerge from a "low G" student.  I have seen it happen, and it is why I
teach.


-----


JARON LANIER, a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual
reality, and founder and former CEO of VPL.


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