Integrity and Intelligence

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Integrity and Intelligence

Integrity and intelligence are not givens but choices. They are acts of will as well as brain power. They require effort, sometimes courage. Their opposites—stupidity and malice (or weakness)—have their attractions. We are witnessing their erosion, indeed gleeful abandonment. I am not just referring to the current political era but to a broader phenomenon, including the universities and so-called intelligentsia. Politics has trumped (Trumped) intelligence and integrity. Your friends have abandoned these admirable traits—you might have yourself (not that you would admit it). Behavioral contagion is real; mass psychology is a thing. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s everywhere. The causes are unclear, but history is full of it. Keep an eye out for it—you can’t miss it. The unmistakable sign of it is giving terrible arguments for absurd positions. Fill in the blanks.

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The London Review of Books and Me

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The London Review of Books and Me

I used to write regularly for the London Review of Books, beginning in 1985 with a piece on Donald Davidson. At that time Karl Miller was the editor (I used to spot him around UCL where we both then worked). I liked Karl (also his brother-in-law Jonathan Miller—no relation). I then wrote several reviews for the magazine, on Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Collingwood, Putnam, Strawson, Warnock, Singer, Sacks, and others. I also published a short story there (“The Bed Reptile”) and a diary piece from America. I was what you would call a regular contributor; it was a mutually agreeable arrangement. But it all came to a sudden halt in 1995, under a new editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers. I had been asked to review a collection of essays on Philippa Foot (Virtues and Reasons), which I duly did. For some reason, there was a long delay between submission and publication, which is apt to give an impression of dilatoriness on the part of the reviewer (which I have never been guilty of). Occasionally I would ask when it would appear and got vague answers. The editor hinted to me that they felt it was perhaps too academic for them and might be dropped. Let me make something clear: all that reviewing took serious time away from my own research and writing, producing a tremendous amount of ambivalence in me. Still, I thought it was worthwhile (just about). But not if the piece would be dropped. That would mean I had wasted my time and I would not wish to write such reviews if there was a good chance they might not be published. Nor did I agree that my review was overly academic—I was quite capable of judging what kind of review would be appropriate. Also: don’t ask me to review books with serious academic content if you don’t want to publish reviews geared to such content. Eventually, late in the day, they published it, tucked into the back of the paper. The experience discouraged me from writing for them in the future, and I told them so. I even wrote a letter for their correspondence column informing readers that they should not expect to see my reviews again (I gave no reason). The magazine never asked me to write for them again and I don’t believe they ever reviewed any more of my own books. As it happens, I soon started writing for the New Republic, and later the New York Review of Books. Such is the life of a jobbing reviewer. These days I write no reviews and am not invited to. I suppose I should be grateful, but the reasons don’t bear examination.

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The New York Times and Me

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The New York Times and Me

I used to write for the New York Times. It started in 1999 when they asked me to review three books on AI. They printed this review on the front page of the Book Review section and I received a lot of correspondence about it. This was quickly followed up by two other book reviews, culminating in a review of a book by Antonio Damasio called Looking for Spinoza, in which I criticized the book for being untrue and unoriginal (it advocated the James-Lange theory of emotion). Meanwhile they reviewed three books by me: The Mysterious Flame, The Making of a Philosopher, and The Power of Movies. I was also asked to write an op-ed about movies (it was Oscar time). All this ended in 2006 when I pointed out to the editors that the printed review of the movie book got the title of the book wrong and missed an obvious irony on my part. I have not been asked to review again and none of my later books have been reviewed by them. Don’t ask me why. (Later there was a rather inept article on you-know-what.) My guess is that they didn’t like the tone and content of my Damasio review and were embarrassed about the error in the review of my movies book. I never inquired and have since lost a lot of respect for that newspaper (the Book Review is hardly worth reading these days, though I still make an attempt).

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On the Multiplicity of Species

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On the Multiplicity of Species

We can explain the origin of species: where they came from and how (other species by mutation and natural selection). We can explain the diversity of species: how and why they differ from each other (adaptation to different environments). We can explain the complexity of species (progressive evolution with increasing design demands). But can we explain the multiplicity of species—the sheer number of them? There are about two million species currently existing on planet Earth and millions now extinct: why so many? Why not half a million or ten thousand or thirty-two? How many chemical elements are there? 266, according to my table—not millions. How many kinds of elementary particles are there? Half a dozen maybe. How many types of celestial bodies are there? Not more than a hundred. How many types of rocks are there, or types of mountains, or types of watery expanse? Not a great number. Nature doesn’t normally produce natural kinds in the high figures we find with animal (and plant) species. It seems excessive, anomalous, in need of explanation. If we came across a planet with, say, 200 species, we wouldn’t be astonished; we would find it perfectly natural. But our planet swarms with millions of animal and plant types, as if it can’t get enough—why? Surely, there was a time when it had many fewer (how many kinds of bacteria were there on early Earth?), so why did we end up with so many species?

We might compare the case to the existence of human artifacts: works of art, types of furniture, means of transportation, etc. There are a great many of these too, in excess of naturally produced (non-living) objects. The explanation is plain to see: they come from the human creative mind, particularly the faculty of imagination. There are hugely many things we can imagine, envisage, conceive of—and hence construct. Our intelligence generates multiplicity on a grand scale. So, is this why there are so many different species? That was the traditional way of thinking: a creative intelligence, equipped with mental multiplicity, is responsible for the multiplicity of species—God or some equivalent. This intelligence chose to create these many species and it had the power to do it. Why, is a question of theology—did God just wish to give his prize creation, Man, something spectacular to look at? But, ruling out this kind of answer, how did nature manage to produce such multitudinous diversity? We would expect to find a sea-dwelling species or two, and a few land-dwellers, and even several air-dwellers—but why untold millions? The Earth just doesn’t have the level of multiplicity capable of giving rise to the number of species we observe—it doesn’t have that many different environments. Mutational multiplicity won’t explain it—even if there were that many types of mutation, not all of them survive to create a new species. Nor is natural selection itself so numerically profligate—there are only so many ways of surviving and dying. Nor can we suppose that planet Earth possesses some sort of multiplicity genie or energy or soul—as if it just aches to produce as many species as possible. If I were pressed to estimate how many species there ought to be, given the physical conditions on Earth, I would say, oh, maybe 235, give or take. If I were an explorer from outer space four billion years ago, surveying the state of planet Earth, I would estimate that the planet would likely produce something on the order of a few hundred species, or even a number in the low twenties. For why should such a drab little place with not much going for it be able to give rise to such a multiplicity of life-forms? What if I told you that in a hundred years our planet would double its species plurality, or quadruple it, or more, so producing a billion species? Wouldn’t you find that rather implausible and in need of explanation. Yet that is what Earth did, in effect: it produced a heck of a lot of different plant and animal species, far more than would have been predictable. We take this for granted, because we see the multiplicity around us every day, but even still we are astounded when told the true numerical magnitude of species existing on Earth today. It seems hard to believe, almost miraculous, verging on the inexplicable. The number may as well be infinite!

There is an answer to our conundrum that one sometimes hears bruited, though it is seldom spelled out. It has to do with niches.[1] If you look in the dictionary under “niche”, you find “a shallow recess, especially one in a wall to display an ornament”, or “a comfortable or suitable position in life” (OED). The intuitive idea is that of a specific type of place or context in which something can be located—a sort of home. In biology a niche consists of a part of the overall environment in which an animal (or plant) finds its home—its comfort zone, its place of residence. It can be quite complex, involving food sources, conspecifics, predators, mating opportunities, territory, etc. The thought then is that there are as many niches as there are species: each species has its distinctive niche—its corresponding slice of the world. For every species, there is a niche that “fits” it—there is a one-one correspondence. Thus, the multiplicity of niches matches the multiplicity of species—the former explains the latter. A niche antecedently exists and a species comes to occupy it—that’s why there are as many species as there are. Niches have the right cardinality to explain species cardinality. But there are problems with this explanation. Can’t two or more species occupy the same niche? Butterflies, beetles, big cats—don’t the various species of these have the same “home”, occupy the same ecological niche? If so, species multiplicity exceeds niche multiplicity. Secondly, why should every potential niche be filled by an actual species? At one time most niches would have no occupants, since the right species had yet to evolve, so actual niches don’t entail actual species to fill them. Recesses don’t always have ornaments embedded in them. Maybe diverse niches explain species diversity, but they don’t explain species multiplicity. A watery niche explains the existence of a water-living species, and similarly for a terrestrial or aerial niche; but why so many such species? The structure of the environment doesn’t by itself generate such a multiplicity; we need some factor internal to life-forms themselves—some inner impetus towards endless multiplication. Is it all just a strange contingency with no systematic explanation, no underlying law? But the trend towards multiplicity is too strong to shrug off in this way. There seems to be a biological law of increasing species multiplicity during the course of evolutionary history, but the reason for this is obscure—or so it seems to me. It appears to be spontaneous, not predictable from the objective character of the environment—intrinsic to life itself. It is as if life revels in multiplying its forms—as if it favors creativity of life forms. But what sense does this make? It sounds mystical and New Age, yet another manifestation of the old elan vital.  And actually, even theologically, the situation is puzzling—why would God decide to make so many species? What is the point of thousands of species of beetle or butterfly? Consider a forest: full of trees of different species, but all living in the same stretch of geography—why not just one or two species? And it isn’t as if all these species are built to last—most species eventually go extinct. The multiplicity is constantly being whittled away, so why produce it in the first place? Nature seems populous beyond reason, pointlessly prolific. Just because it has the potential to house so many species (all those available niches), why must it do so? Darwin told us how one species evolves from another, but he didn’t tell us why so incredibly many species evolve this way. Species replace each other, but why do so many coexist? Even economic markets contain fewer products and they are the result of unlimited human creativity. Nature seems too creative—and yet it isn’t really creative at all (it has no imagination). We can see how a great many dog breeds came to exist by intentional artificial selection, but we can’t see how so many animal species came to exist by blind natural selection. Intentional breeding for variety doesn’t create as many distinct species as nature left to its own devices (think of butterflies). What law of nature explains this? What trait of God explains it, for that matter? Creationism doesn’t help with the problem (not that it has anything going for it anyway). Call this the mystery of multiplicity.[2]

[1] I could as well say habitat here—the totality of an organism’s impinging relevant environmental conditions—but I think “niche” better captures the idea we want.

[2] Darwin draws our attention to a similar problem about the multiplicity of human races: it is puzzling why these races exist in their actual plurality, given that there is little connection between human environments and human physiology (see The Descent of Man, chapter VII, “On the Races of Man”). There is really no reason to expect a variety of races given the places humans live and the life-styles they adopt. It is as if nature simply felt like having several races (and varieties within races) without any compelling reason to do so. I should also note that it is not even clear why there are two sexes in nature instead of one. This is taken by biologists to require explanation, and the explanations offered are controversial. Note, too, that bodily organs don’t have the enormous variety that species do—there isn’t a million types of internal organs, just a handful. Cell types are also few in number. Yet species of organisms climb into the big numbers—we don’t even know how many species exist on Earth exactly. There is nothing unnatural about a ten-species planet and yet on Earth nature has catapulted many millions of species into existence. We have a many-species problem.

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A Proof of Man’s Apish Origins

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A Proof of Man’s Apish Origins

For the purposes of this proof, I will assume that general Creationism is false: animals evolved over billions of years by mutation and natural selection. The question at issue is how to establish that the species Homo sapiens evolved from an apelike ancestor.[1] It is not that I think this has not already been proved (it has); I am interested in exploring the epistemology of the question—how it can be known, what kind of justification might be given for it. I am interested in the epistemic status of the claim—the kind of reasoning that might lead to it (so my aims are primarily philosophical). What is the logical structure of the question’s answer? So, we begin by assuming that other existing animals all evolved from distinct species from which they are descended by natural selection. Then the human species might follow suit or it might not. If it doesn’t, it would be anomalous—perhaps separately created from scratch by God or some powerful alien. That is massively implausible for many reasons—we would need such superior intelligences to exist and for them to have some very strange designs. Thus, we may assume that man did evolve from an earlier distinct species: our species fits with the rest of nature as to its origins, on pain of denying the uniformity of the biological world. The question, then, is which earlier species—and here things get interesting. For there are indefinitely many species from which man could (logically) have evolved. All we know so far is that man descends from some earlier species, but why not crabs or dogs or reptiles? What if someone maintained that we are ignorant of what type of species gave rise to the human species, though some type certainly did? The answer to this skeptical possibility is obvious and immediate: we need to identify the existing species most similar to us—then we can reasonably infer that we and they share a common ancestor. Clearly, crabs, dogs, and reptiles are not the most similar to us—apes are. We look and behave in very similar ways—no species more so. Therefore, we evolved from apelike creatures: that is the only rational conclusion we can draw. We know what kind of species we evolved from—whatever the most similar animals to us evolved from. We know that we and contemporary apes share a close common ancestor. If Neandertals still existed, we could make the same inference with respect to them. Thus, we know we had some distinct species as ancestor, by the uniformity of biological nature; and we also know that that species had to be ape-like, because apes are most like us and so share our ancestry. By the same argument, apes could know they had a human-like ancestor, because they are similar to us and share their ancestry with us. Of course, we both no doubt differ from this common ancestor quite a bit, but it is still our common ancestor and thus like both of us. Humans are apelike and apes are humanlike—neither of us is crablike or doglike or reptilelike. Put simply, we descended from bygone apes, as apes also did (symmetrically, they could say they descended from humanlike creatures not crabs—that life-form). More cautiously, we share a relatively recent apish ancestor. Our ancestry went through an apish stage, as the ancestors of apes went through a humanish stage (though not humans in their contemporary form). We have proved this proposition without relying on genetic evidence or the fossil record or microanatomy or actual observation of evolutionary lineages (not that there is anything wrong with these kind of evidence). The proof is pretty commonsensical and a priori, requiring no elaborate scientific discoveries; it is intelligible to the scientifically illiterate person. It establishes an important and non-obvious proposition, one well worth knowing.

I now want to make a stronger claim, namely that it is actually quite easy to establish a general Darwinian position, at least in principle. That is, we can show that all animals evolved by mutation and natural selection from a fairly exiguous evidential basis. This may sound unlikely, but consider: if we could observe a single instance of evolution by natural selection, we would have shown that all animals evolved this way. Suppose we observed a mouse evolving from a non-mouse by natural selection (or even a fly): wouldn’t that show that all animals came into existence this way because otherwise nature would not be uniform? I don’t mean to suggest I have solved the problem of induction; I mean only that it would be sound science to generalize the particular case. If it can happen in this way, and our sample case is not special in any respect, then it must happen in this way. It’s like inferring general gravitation from observation of specific cases. If we observed something else happening in the production of a new species, we could infer that too as a general proposition; you don’t need to examine every case individually. So, we could establish the truth of Darwinism by arranging an experiment in which a new species observably evolves by natural selection; it might take a while but it could be done. We would then know that Creationism is false (of course, we already know this on other grounds). We could then conjoin this result to the above argument to show that man evolved from apish creatures. There is really not that much that needs to be done in order to establish the general Darwinian position; it isn’t some speculative unverifiable leap in the dark, and wasn’t so in Darwin’s time (of course, he had a lot of opposition to contend with). As commonsense science, his “theory” is overwhelmingly plausible—not say inescapable. Evolutionary biology is easy! It’s epistemologically a lot easier than astronomy or physics or chemistry or psychology. You just need to get the junk out of the way and the theory becomes clearly and obviously true. It isn’t that we are dealing with incredibly remote history that we can only speculate about; we are dealing with obvious observable facts (in principle anyway). Indeed, once we establish that intraspecies variation exists, it is a very short step to reach the conclusion that species evolve by natural selection (this was the main point of The Origin of Species). You don’t need much more empirical information, since it is relatively a priori to deduce that there is no principled difference between intraspecies variation and speciation. The whole thing is staring us in the face, with only tradition and religion blocking the view. Clearly, speciation is intraspecies variation writ large; clearly, if one species evolved from another, they all did; and clearly, man evolved from apes, they being the obvious candidate for man’s species origins. Clearly, too, the whole process stretches back a long way, because this kind of change doesn’t happen overnight. All the rest is icing on the cake. Darwinian science is really commonsense science. Of course, we evolved from apes; and of course, all animals exist by natural selection extending over geological time. Nothing else makes any sense. This is not to belittle Darwin’s achievement; it is just to put on record the fact that it enjoys firm epistemic foundations and is in no way contradictory to common sense. Dog breeding by itself is virtually sufficient to establish the whole thing, as Darwin himself in effect recognized. If artificial selection can produce very different breeds, natural selection can do likewise. The breeds have their origin in intermediate breeds, and similarly for species. And it couldn’t be that one breed of dog alone (say, the golden retriever) owes its origin to some other supernatural mechanism. The essential points are all contained in dog breeding: the origin of species, the descent of man, the length of evolutionary time, the differentiating action of natural selection. We just need to perform an elementary mutatis mutandis.[2]

[1] This paper was prompted by reading chapter six of Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) in which many details are adduced to defend the thesis of our ape ancestry. Of course, that thesis has been elaborately defended ever since, and is now accepted science.

[2] It has often been remarked that the idea of evolution by natural selection is simple and available to any intelligent student of nature—so why did it take so long before Darwin and Wallace formulated it? Similarly, the practice of breeding (artificial selection) had been a commonplace long before Darwin realized its implications—why was this not recognized before? In effect, nature can breed for success as well as human breeders, exploiting the power of genetics to shape organisms; instead of “natural selection” Darwin could have said “natural breeding” (both verbs carry connotations of intentional intelligence). Animals naturally vary and all we or nature have to do is perpetuate some variations and eliminate others: that is the heart of the matter. Really, it should have been obvious how species came to exist—and the theory can be stated in a short paragraph. It isn’t some arcane esoteric piece of genius-level science (like the big bang and quantum theory).

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Transitional Trump

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Transitional Trump

Trump has finally made the transition (he’s a “trans”): from falsehood to nonsense. He has long been unconstrained by truth and tells whopping lies all the time. We are accustomed to that. But now he has gone a stage further: he has descended into nonsense (very Lewis Carroll). He is no longer constrained by logic and simple coherence (Gaza, Canada, the FBI, the CIA, etc. etc.). His followers lap it up, but it is amusing to see fellow politicians trying to make sense of it all. He gets that self-satisfied blank look on his face and starts spouting total rubbish—strings of words with no logical connection, odd divagations, meaningless phrases, massive non sequiturs, strange locutions, mangled words, weird fantasies. He seems to dwell on the borders of sanity. I wonder what the next stage will be: will it be pure gibberish? What will his supporters and enablers do then? Will they start to talk gibberish themselves, or try to offer meaningful paraphrases of his verbal tangles? How far can he go on the road to incoherence before they call a halt?

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Another Skateboarding Story

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Another Skateboarding Story

There I was, happily skateboarding. But this time I had company: a little girl was out on her little scooter. She waved to me; I waved back. Her father was in the driveway, cleaning up leaves. Soon she was scootering next to me and we were having a bit of a race. She was remarkably competent and quick. Then she said, “How long have you been doing this?” I replied “A couple of months”. She said she had just started, and indeed I had not seen her before. Then she asked, “How old are you?” I replied “Seventy-four”. She looked uncomprehending, the number being so large. She responded “I’m five”. I complimented her on her skills and on her scooter. Then her father called and she went in. I carried on skateboarding. When I got home, I went on Amazon and ordered a scooter for myself. You can learn things in all sorts of ways.

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An Essay Concerning Worm Understanding

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An Essay Concerning Worm Understanding

Your average worm has quite a bit of worm know-how. It knows how to dig a burrow of the right width, depth, and angle; it knows how to plug up the mouth of the burrow with leaves of various shapes and sizes; it knows how to produce castings of the right vermiform architecture; it knows how to position itself in the burrow when it is dry or cold outside. It has a kind of intelligence (worm consciousness is moot).[1] Worms have been around forever, so they must be doing something right; epistemologically, they are not absolute beginners in the art of survival. But they are deficient in the sensory department: they are blind and deaf, have only a crude sense of smell and taste, and are generally oblivious of the impinging world. They can, however, feel things and sense vibrations, so they are not entirely without sensory input: they are the recipients of tactile sense-data. Still, they are afflicted with poverty-of-the-stimulus: not much goes in and it is not very rich or instructive—it doesn’t encode what they manifestly know. The only conclusion we can draw is that their know-how is a result of innate endowment; it is instinctual and inborn. Worm knowledge (“understanding”) is in the worm’s genes. It isn’t just a copy of what their senses deliver. The worm’s slate is by no means blank. Nativism is true of the worm’s world-view. Empiricism is not a plausible theory of how worms come to know things. Evidently, all of its general knowledge is innate, with tactile sense-data confined to indicating the present state of the environment, these interacting with the general innate programs or proto-cognitions. A “rationalist” philosophy of worm intelligence would thus seem recommended: it comes from within not from outside. Even Locke would agree that much worm knowledge is not derived from the senses; it is derived from the genes and hence hereditary. It is ancestrally derived, no doubt going back many millions of years. Every worm generation automatically contains the knowledge that is helpful to worm survival and reproduction. Worms don’t learnwhat they know. Their burrow know-how is passed down the generations and does not need to be acquired anew by the individual. If we started our study of animal knowledge with worms, we would be disposed to a general nativism-rationalism. The poverty of the stimulus is only too apparent (Chomsky would have a field day with worm burrowing competence, which is quite complex and generative, even “grammatical”).

What proportion of total worm knowledge is innate? We would need to assign numbers to items of knowledge in order to answer this question (how many items of knowledge does a typical worm have?). We would also do well to assign a numerical value to the importance of the knowledge in question. These are not easy tasks, but I think a rough answer can be provided: most of the important stuff is innate. It isn’t that the vast majority of worm knowledge is based on sensory learning with only a small amount deriving from the genes. Just to have a heuristic figure, let’s say nine-tenths of it is innate, and this the good stuff. Innate knowledge is the rule not the exception. If a worm lost its stock of innate knowledge, it would be finished as a viable worm; it wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Partial lack would also be pretty catastrophic. True, its tactile sense is also important (the worm couldn’t survive for long with tactile blindness), but the innate component is clearly indispensable. Now, many species on Earth evolved from primeval worms, including humans, and animals tend to conserve the features of the animals from which they evolve—species evolve from small variations in their ancestor’s phenotype and genotype. Thus, later species often have a high proportion of genes in common with even their remotest ancestors (we are said to have 70% of our genes in common with the acorn worm). The basic structure of a derived species never strays too far from the structure of its ancestor species, despite superficial differences. So, I now want to suggest a biological law: later species have the same ratio of innate to acquired knowledge as their ancestors had. This law is empirical and testable (in principle), but on a priori grounds it is reasonable to expect it to hold. According to this law, then, human knowledge (we have been getting to that) is nine-tenths innate and one-tenth acquired (I am speaking approximately). A tenth of what we know we learned through our senses, but the overwhelming preponderance of our knowledge is inborn. Nearly everything we know we already knew in the womb. Of course, we know a good deal by means of the senses, particularly with regard to history and geography; but the really important stuff—the skeleton, the cognitive background—is innate. Possibly all concepts are innate in one way or another, as well as much propositional knowledge (and know-how): the foundations of knowledge, the building-blocks, are genetically specified. It isn’t that most knowledge is “empirical” with only a small amount “rational”; the opposite is the case. This is not the impression you get from classical discussions (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz): the idea tends to be that nearly all human knowledge is admittedly acquired through the senses, with only a small residue arising from the intellect alone. But the lowly worm teaches us otherwise: nature favors the innate over the acquired. If we trace our ancestry back through the generations to worms, we will find a steady adherence to the law adumbrated above; there is no sudden leap to an animal that reversed the polarities, as it were. Evolution never switched from the ratio set up at the time of those ancestral worms (they too, of course, come from a long line of earlier organisms successively modified). There was no saltation to an unprecedented empiricist mind; minds continued to be mainly innately formed. In the case of humans, we notice the acquired knowledge more, but from a deeper perspective innate knowledge is basic and ubiquitous. We are mainly native knowers. Our senses have not taken over the task of installing knowledge from our innate endowment; it isn’t that we have become blank slates, unlike the animals that gave rise to us. That would be evolutionarily bizarre, contrary to fundamental biological principles. Other bilateral creatures (fish, lizards, monkeys) did not suddenly convert to empiricism, so why should we? No, we are all modeled on that ancient prototype and progenitor—the humble burrowing worm. We all suffer from stimulus-poverty to one degree or another, which needs to be backed up with innate systems of know-how; empiricism is unlikely to be true of us alone. Nativism is the law of the land, the basic life plan. Nature favors the rationalist philosophy. The human brain is an evolved organ conforming to earlier brains; it is therefore primarily a device for storing innately given information, skills, and habits. And isn’t this what we should expect from a Darwinian point of view—isn’t it better for the genes to build vital knowledge in rather than leaving the individual organism to do all the epistemic work itself? Why take any chances? Worms need to hit the ground (literally) running (not literally), so they had better come equipped with the know-how they are going to need; you don’t want to be learning how to construct a burrow by trial-and-error or by watching another worm do it. A Darwinian perspective thus complements the arguments of the rationalist philosophers, strengthening their position: human (and animal) knowledge is largely inborn; it is the rule not the exception. The various forms of nativism that have been defended in recent years (conceptual, linguistic, moral, folk-physical, etc.) are thus instances of a general biological law, which we might call the Law of Genetic Epistemic Preponderance (the GEP Law), or the Worm Law in honor of that suggestive species).[2]

[1] Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms is a good source of information on worms and their life-style (quiet, hidden, transforming).

[2] Darwin was impressed by the prodigious amounts of earth that are ingested by earthworms and ejected in the form of castings, thus altering Earth’s landscape. But he wasn’t so moved by the extent of their knowledge given their lack of sensory capacities; to me, they seem like epistemic prodigies, knowing so much but exposed to so little. Not the blank slate but the carved and ornamented slate. The worm is a rich repository of inborn information. Perhaps the senses evolved when organisms started to move around more; then they needed to see and hear. We are all worms in motion (no shame in that). Tubes on wheels, as it were. (The digestive apparatus is clearly vermiform.) Of course, we are very sophisticated worm-progeny, but our basic form is worm-shaped; we clearly didn’t descend from starfish or jelly fish or barnacles.

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