The Origin of Mimicry
There are a great many instincts and behaviors that are claimed to be “programmed” or “hardwired” into the brain. In fact, seeing as the human genome only contains a mere 20,000 genes, and only a small fraction of those are dedicated to the nervous system, the number of behaviors that people insist are so deeply baked in probably outnumbers the number of genes that could conceivably do it.
The much more likely explanation is that a great many of these instincts and behaviors are either emergent or are actually learned, but on some very deep and subconscious level.
Human engineering is generally built around a kind of explicit engineering - we pick some set of desired features and behaviors of the end product, we design individual mechanisms for each one, and we link them together. If there is a more abstract and less obvious way in which we could produce this same functionality through a more emergent system, this is beyond the scope of human understanding.
Human engineering is fundamentally limited by our understanding. Engineering is a form of mimicry, we observe some phenomena in the natural world, we learn how to replicate it, and we then extrapolate the consequences to apply it as a tool. This often involves a great deal of tinkering, we cannot simply sit in our armchairs and project forward all the infinite implications of a new technique with perfect accuracy, we must instead confront the chaos of the world by tinkering and experimenting. Nature is far more creative than we are, and will throw curveballs at us that contradict our intuition. Any decision tree of how to interact with a sufficiently complex tool will inevitably result in an exponential explosion in the number of branches, and exploring them all one by one in our minds is far too costly a task to do in any reasonable time without missing the vast majority of interesting things.
The human mind is a library, and when we build things we pull ideas from it. If that library is missing a technique no matter how simple or powerful, humans will overlook it until it is discovered through tinkering, understood, and added to the corpus of human knowledge. And there always will be a tremendous amount that is missing, the human mind may have a tremendous capacity, but it is nothing compared to the Library of Babel.
The endless tinkering of the blind watchmaker of evolution meanwhile is untethered to such limitations, and is thus free to master far more bizarre modes of engineering that neither it nor humans can comprehend. The forces that designed the human brain are free from the constraints by which we work. It may perhaps innovate more slowly, but it quite reliably produces things that we would otherwise have no idea how to replicate without our own mimicry work.
Mimicry as an Emergent Behavior
Many human and animal behaviors that are assumed to be innate and “hardwired” are more likely to be either learned or are emergent. One I’d like to pay particular attention to is mimicry, and I’d like to propose an emergent mechanism.
Navigating the world is fundamentally difficult, and I think the extent to which it is difficult is greatly underappreciated solely because we have collected such a tremendous corpus of knowledge with which to navigate it. Life today is in most ways much easier than it was a few centuries ago, let alone a few thousand or longer.
If we assume that the brain, by observing the world around it, attempts to learn to make predictions about it, and if we assume a basic ability to perform pathfinding and path integration, I argue that these basic components alone are sufficient for mimicry to emerge.
Much of the cortex appears to consist of circuitry that evolved originally for navigating physical spaces that was then adapted to navigate conceptual spaces. If we have the ability to understand our current position, understand the position of our desired destination, and have some map of the obstacles along our way to getting there, then some simple pathfinding algorithms can guide us there.
The brain navigates with a combination of grid cells, place cells, and head direction cells; grid cells which encode our coordinates using a hierarchy of hexagonal grids, place cells which activate when we are near known landmarks, and head direction cells which encode the direction in which we are facing. It really doesn’t take much to combine these basic tools and get a pathfinding algorithm that approximately resembles something like A*.
Granted, A* works best if the landscape is relatively sparse of major obstacles, and it doesn’t work at all if the destination itself isn’t known. Navigating 3-dimensional euclidean space is relatively tractable, but navigating the much higher-dimensional, hyperbolic spaces in which conceptual decision trees and complex interactions in the world are encoded is a vastly more difficult problem. In terms of complexity, the majority of problems there turn out to be in the NP or NP-Hard complexity classes. Such problems are exponentially difficult if you do not know the solution, but are comparatively trivial as soon as you do.
If you don’t know how to get somewhere, it will be exceptionally difficult to find. If someone gives you the directions, it becomes easy.
Suppose you observe someone perform actions A, B, and C and get result D. If you had no understanding of how to accomplish D before, you now have some awareness of the mechanisms by which D can occur, and are free to repeat the formula yourself. Even if you are missing some important details, understanding part of the process can guide your exploration of these vast search trees and help you find a working solution vastly more quickly than some kind of blind brute force would likely permit.
This mechanism requires no dedicated, hardwired instinct for mimicry, but rather emerges from simply watching the world, learning to predict it, and then attempting to navigate to desired goals. It also fits extremely well with complexity theory, in that the existence of a known solution to a problem instantly makes otherwise intractable problems exponentially simpler. In fact, even partial solutions can narrow the search space dramatically; transmission can be lossy, the environment can be noisy, and exponential improvements in tractability can still occur.
Mimicry may be less of a preprogrammed instinct and more a phenomena that emerges from the fundamental laws governing the ways in which information about even partial solutions make complex problems exponentially more tractable.
Memetic and Genetic Lineages
The human genome is 3 billion base pairs, each of which is equivalent to two bits of information. This in total is 750 MB of data, though the vast majority is “junk DNA”, which does not appear to directly store useful genes, though may serve other purposes. Even if such junk DNA is much more functional than we expect, 750MB is the hard limit on information storage.
The human brain however contains many tens to hundreds of trillions of synapses, equivalent to many terabytes of storage. Even if we insist that only a tiny percentage of this can be information capable of being propagated across generations, and even if we assume that the vast majority of animals have brains far smaller than ours, it still does not take much for the information being propagated memetically to greatly exceed that being propagated genetically.
It’s not uncommon for people to observe pets raised around other animals taking on traits from other species. I recently had a conversation with someone who remarked about their cat having the habit of “barking” on account of spending so much time around their pet dogs. It’s not uncommon for people to share photos and videos online of pets with stunningly human-like behaviors. It may be that all animals are in fact mimicry machines.
A great deal of an animal’s extended phenotype may in fact not be genetic at all, perhaps much less than expected. Evolution may even optimize animal body plans over time to better conform to the kinds of common behaviors that they are learning and transmitting down generations. I also would not be surprised if this works in the opposite direction as well; that these changes made to animal body plans make such common behaviors more convenient and therefore make them more likely to be tried again even if the memetic lineage is broken.
Thank you for reading today’s article. I’ve been very busy lately but am hoping to publish a bit more regularly here.
For those who have not heard, some friends and I have launched a magazine for optimistic, realistic science fiction called Possibilia. Our goal is to provide alternatives to the overwhelming dystopian doom-and-gloom that takes up so many conversations about what the future will look like. It’s currently hosted on substack as well, and we are hoping to launch a print magazine later this year.
We just published our second story last week, with a nonfiction companion piece for it dropping tomorrow (Friday, April 5th). We’re currently aiming for a weekly publishing schedule over there, though with a mix of content, not just stories and companion pieces.
I’m hoping to publish more content here too of course, so feel free to share and subscribe for more.