Ironick

Hawkins Law

I came across this excellent aphorism in someone's collection of quotes:

Hawkins Law: Progress does not involve replacing one theory that is wrong with one that is right, rather it involves replacing one theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong.

As usual, I tried to determine the source of the quote before using it. I tracked it down to this journal article: Problems with Monitoring Heparin Anticoagulation. The article cites David W. Hawkins, Pharm.D. as the source. I eventually emailed Dr. Hawkins via a institution he is associated with, and received this reply:

Nick: 

I checked with the author of the paper you cited (Henry Bussey) and he claims that I gave him that quote in an unpublished paper I wrote about 25 years ago.  I quite frankly don’t remember making the statement. But, if I did, I am sure I was arguing that we often learn more from theories that are flawed but nevertheless insightful than from what is true and already known.  Such theories generate debate and deep thinking and propel us to make considerable progress in the discovery of new knowledge and fresh perspective.  It is like Darwin’s theory of evolution or the old adage that we learn more from our mistakes than from our correct way of doing things.

Cordially,

David Hawkins

Imagine coining an aphorism that becomes widely circulated twenty-five years later and not even know it.

PS Here is a more frequently quoted paraphrase:

Progress does not consist of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is right. It consists of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong.

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A good memory is like a good notation.

While surfing the Getty Research Institute's Metadata resources (which is a great resource for information standards), I ran across this quote from Vannevar Bush's profoundly influential article "As We May Think" (which influenced Ted Nelson's Xanadu, which influenced Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web):

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting manifold things he does not need to have immediately to hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important. [emphasis added]
Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
http://www.w3.org/History/1945/vbush/vbush-all.shtml

I love this quote because it reminds me of my favorite quote about the importance of good notation:

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race. Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to  learn that ... a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility ... Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the  gradual discovery of a perfect notation. [...] By the aid of symbolism, we can make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically, by the eye, which otherwise would call into play the higher faculties of the brain. [...] It is a  profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. [emphasis added]
Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911

So Vannevar its talking about enabling humanity to simplify thought by minimizing what must be remembered, and Whitehead is talking about simplifying thought by minimizing the operations we can do without conscious thought. Both desires presage the computer's ability to augment human thought by carrying out mental operations, including memory, for us.

Prions and the Windows monoculture debate.

My friend Keith recently sent me an email with the subject Self Organizing containing a link to the following New York Times article 

Scientists are reporting that, for the first time, they have made an artificial prion, or misfolded protein, that can, by itself, produce a deadly infectious disease in mice and may help explain the roots of mad cow disease."

The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are strong evidence for the "protein-only hypothesis," the controversial idea that a protein, acting alone without the help of DNA or RNA, a cousin of DNA, can cause certain kinds of infectious diseases.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/30/national/30protein.html?hp

I wonder if the Science article mentions the concept of enzyme in discussing prions. Prions (technically PrP-sc prions) strike me as being protein catalysts (enzymes) since they shape a chemical reaction (formation of a new protein) without being consumed by the reaction. In fact, they seem to be a unique form of self-transforming enzyme. A prion doesn't replicate (compose copies of itself from parts), it transforms the shape of an already existing (normal) prion (PrP-c) in a new (abnormal) prion (PrP-sc). This new shape can then reshape other normal proteins until all of them have been reshaped. This ability to transform from whole vs. assemble from parts is why a prion, unlike all other infectious agents, does not need genetic material. I think of a prion as an autocatalytic enzyme, self-catalyzing enzyme, or self-copying enzyme.

This leads me to think of my blog entry on standards as templates. If the template has a flaw, it can prove catastrophic after millions of copies have been made from the template. Which reminds me of an email debate on the Microsoft monoculture I intended to blog but never did. Here is an excerpt that summarizes my opinion:

I've resisted the urge to jump into this fray up til now because I think the issues around monoculture vs. biodiversity are so hotly debated and politically loaded in the life sciences, why would we look to them to gain insight into technological diversity?

For example, if monoculture is such a bad thing, then life on earth is in trouble, because we are all based on the same set of four DNA nucleotide bases (A, G, C, T)! And ohmygod, we're all based on the same 64 codons of the "genetic code" that maps DNA to amino acids. If any hostile entity were able to inflict damage due to this fundamental "DNA monoculture" shared by all life on earth could be used to devastate the planet! Nooooo!

If only evolution had been wiser and had evolved life on earth with diverse genetic architectures based on different nucleotides or different codons, we'd be at less risk out complete annihilation from one threat.

I'm NOT saying diversity provides or doesn't provide benefits, inherent or otherwise. I simply point out that it is an open and interesting research question in the life sciences as to the benefits of varying degrees of biological diversity. At certain layers of the ecosystem we see massive diversity (orchids, insects), at other layers, none at all (all life uses the same four nucleotide bases; homo sapien is the only extant species descended from homo habilias-sp?), at others we see something in between (typically there are fewer "top predator" species than prey species in an ecosystem). I have my own pet theory about some of the factors that appear to govern diversity (e.g., when one layer spans another, diversity decreases in the spanned layer, and increases in the layer above the spanning layer), which I'll write down one of these days.

Bottom Line: No one knows the general laws of equilibrium or optimization of diversity vs. homogeneity in biological ecosystems, so why go around spouting dubious monoculture analogies to software ecosystems. Talk about useless FUD.

It now strikes me that the existence of deadly prions is a perfect biological analogy to the Windows monoculture risk. Just as the whole world is at risk from a single Windows virus because we all use Windows, we are all at risk from a single prion (PrP-sc) because we all use the same protein shape in our brains. Is having massive numbers of identical PrP-c's (ie, a prion monoculture) in our brains good or bad? Its good because it makes the brain possible, its bad because it makes it vulnerable.

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness.

Nice summary of an interesting NY Times article a while back, which I meant to blog but didn't. Paul Kelly says it as well or better than I could, so here's his intro paragraph. The rest is highly worth reading. I'll see if I can get a link to the full NY Times article instead of the link to the pay-per-view archive.

This might also be entitled "the endless pursuit of happiness."

NYT Mag story by Jon Gertner about the work on "affective forecasting" by the psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Tim Wilson and the economists George Lowenstein and Daniel Kahneman. Can people accurately predict the outcomes of decisions which are supposed to make them happier? It turns out not. Things that are supposed to make us happy--dream job, dream house, dream car--don't as much as we hoped. Conversely, things we think of as disasters--death of a loved one, a disability--don't turn out to be as bad as we imagine. The implications for economics are obvious: how much does economic behaviour depend on this psychic "defect"? A lot, it turns out, and this has been known since the time of Adam Smith. Simply put, if you are comfortably off, the effort you expend trying to improve your situation is based on a delusion. It requires too much effort for too little payback. You are better off just as you are.

The roots of language don't just diverge-- they converge

This "language tree" is a great example of the "tyranny of the dominant decomposition" because it shows only how languages "split" or speciate. It does not show how various languages come together or converge. See for example English, which is composed of many languages: West Germanic, Latin, French, and a little bit of everything else, including Asian languages. The "tree image" that does capture this complexity of roots converging and branches branching is the Celtic Tree of Life (below in my blog).

The Evolution of Music.

The New York Times reports:

[T]he ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists because it does nothing evident to help survival. Why, therefore, should evolution have built into the human brain this soul-stirring source of pleasure? Man's faculties for enjoying and producing music, Darwin wrote, "must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."

The courting and social cohesion theories of music's origins assume that there are structures in the human brain that have evolved specifically to handle music. If no such structures exist, then Dr. Pinker's theory or something like it is correct.

Clues to the Evolution of Cooperation: Genetic Basis to Fairness.

The New York Times reports:

Two researchers at Emory University, Dr. Sarah F. Brosnan and Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, report today in the journal Nature that they taught female capuchin monkeys to trade pebbles for pieces of food. The capuchins were caged in pairs, so that each member of a pair could see the other. If one monkey got a grape in return for her pebble but the other only a less desired piece of cucumber, the shortchanged monkey would often refuse to hand over the pebble in exchange or might decline to eat the cucumber — both very unusual behaviors.

These refusals were often accompanied by emphatic body language, like dashing the pebble or the cucumber on the floor, Dr. Brosnan said. The expressions of exasperation were twice as common if the monkey offered a cucumber saw her companion being given a grape without even having to hand over a pebble.

I suspect that such a genetic sense of fairness also includes an aversion to others' freeriding.

Evolution as Entropy

In searching for information on the "evolution of complexity," I came across a paper entitled The Natural Philosophy of Ecology: Developmental Systems Ecology (Infodynamics) by Stanley N. Salthe. It confirms my own recent insight into the "purpose" of evolution. Evolution of complex systems such as humanity or life itself is not an exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics; it is a consequence of it. Complex systems evolved to maximize the production of entropy! As I put it in my rough notes back in October 2002:

One species is more successful than another in the biological reproduction sense to the degree it can successfully transform energy into copies of itself.

This is restated more generally (and more accurately in terms of entropy production rather than energy transformation) by Salthe:

Dissipative structures, and any systems that expand or grow, can be viewed as maximizing their entropy production, subject to constraints (which increase with age). The expansion of material systems can in general be viewed as a way to maximize entropy production, as the growth itself requires entropy production, and also delivers access to new energy gradients.

Accordingly, the dis-equilibrium that was the "big bang" is returning to equilibrium as quickly as possible through the evolution of matter from energy, astronomical bodies from matter, organic chemistry from planets, biological life from organic chemistry, and intelligence from biological life. Or as Salthe puts it:

Behind these considerations lies the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. According to Frautschi (1982), Landsberg (1984) and Layzer (1976), the expansion of the universe has been so fast that the system went out of global equilibrium rapidly, and has been trying to return to equilibrium ever since. As the system cooled, physical particles emerged, which then gave rise to matter, and this in turn gave rise to mass, which continually aggregated as collisions brought about by a random search for equilibrium evoked gravitation. In this scenario the system has been getting further and further away from an equilibrium distribution of energy and particles, thereby increasing the drive toward equilibration at the same time, thus making the Second Law of Thermodynamics an ever more powerful attractor in the material world as the universe expands.

Given the brute fact of masses of matter stuck in agglomerations nowhere near equilibrium, what can a system do to facilitate the approach to equilibrium? Following Schneider and Kay (1994), on the model of the Bnard instability, the massive frictional world finds a way to increase entropy production by way of convections facilitated by organized configurations abutting energy gradients, which they can use in an orderly manner (see also Swenson, 1997). This is the general explanation for abiotic dissipative structures like hurricanes and eddies; increasing the steepness of energy gradients spontaneously triggers the organization of material systems that will dissipate these same gradients as rapidly as possible. From this point of view, living systems are just a continuation of this project of reducing energy gradients. The evolution of animals is especially easily interpreted in this way: detrivores acquired movement to burrow into gradients; then they acquired mouths and claws to hurry the disintegration; then predators, as well as herbivores, evolve to hurry the production of detritus; then some of these became homeothermic so that gradients might continue to be dissipated even in the absence of activity; then some of these invested in large nervous systems, which consume large amounts of energy continuously. This scenario provides the basic 'meaning' of ecological systems, whose successional phenomenology shows a tendency to maximize energy flows (Lotka, 1922 / Odum and Pinkerton, 1955) by way of configurations and processes at many scalar levels. The punch line -- form results from, and further mediates, convective energy flows, which more effectively degrade energy gradients than would slow frictional conduction, like diffusion.

If I can paraphrase the punch line, and I don't think I have this exactly right yet: Information (i.e., forms, configurations, structures, organizations) production increases in order to increase entropy production. Or perhaps: Information flow increases in order to increase entropy flow.

I cannot begin to describe how important this insight is. I am amazed I have never come across this view before.