Books

“Going meta”

The Making of a Scientific Overview

William H. Calvin

For the interested few,

Gauguin’s three “Deep Questions” (Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?) illustrate what attracted me into doing science back about 1958. Now, more than sixty years later, I find myself able to offer some tentative answers to each of the three questions.

You might reasonably wonder what went into this making of a scientific overview, besides receiving a good liberal arts education (in addition to Departmental Honors in Physics) at Northwestern University. What I have been doing in the meantime, to even attempt such a broad task.

I started in the middle: ‘What are we?’ is home ground for me. I am nominally a medical school professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, a Ph.D. (physiology & biophysics) trained to wiretap brain cells, concerned with how things work inside the brain (more in The Cerebral Code, 1996). I studied single neurons in species ranging from cockroaches to humans for twenty years. More recently, my neurophysiology research has focused on how brain circuits innovate on the timescale of seconds, producing new thoughts with a quality control that keeps our spoken sentences from emerging as incoherent as our nighttime dreams.

Physiology is more about process than is anatomy: physiologists want to know how one thing is transformed into something else—food into blood sugar or, at the high end, phonemes into words, words into phrases, phrases into long complex sentences (Lingua ex Machina, 2000)—and how that creative process is regulated to produce high quality results for novel concepts or plans, as when speaking a sentence that is not one of your standard word phrases.

I also ventured into evolutionary biology in asking how such a creative process came into being, over evolutionary time. For my work on this cognitive side of things—and, perhaps, my science books for general readers—the Association for Psychological Science was kind enough to elect me a Fellow in 1998.

I have progressed toward this overview, thanks to a series of exceptional kindnesses from professors at Northwestern, MIT, Harvard Medical School, UW, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Institute for Advanced Study, and UCSD. My education in paleoanthropology, thirty years following my 1960 encounter with Louis Leakey, was mostly with the kind guidance of Dean Falk; for cognitive science, Dan Dennett and Elizabeth Loftus were similarly influential.

Back in the early 1980s, to broaden my knowledge of genetics and evolutionary ecology, I volunteered to teach introductory biology to UW under­graduates for five terms, while reading the advanced textbooks, especially ecology. (I had, it seems, neglected to take any undergraduate biology courses myself). My advanced biology reading led me to asking both why and how the hominin brain enlarged three-fold in the last several million years, my major research interest.

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Zoom out. As it happens, I have also had an unusual education over the years regarding Gauguin’s other two questions: human origins and how to think about alternative futures.

My interests in paleoanthropology started about 1960 when I was an undergraduate physics major who had talked his way into a graduate cultural anthropology course, where the visiting Louis Leakey handed me a two-million-year-old fossil tooth fresh from Olduvai Gorge. It was warm. (He carried it around loose in his pocket.) Then a sabbatical year as visiting professor of neurobiology in Jerusalem exposed me to archaeology on the weekends.

And for the last twenty years, I have been a member of a small academic group, CARTA, that meets three times a year in the Salk Institute’s boardroom to discuss “Who we are and how we got here,” the first two of Gauguin’s questions. The other people around the big table range from primatologists and paleoanthropologists to linguists and neurosurgeons, plus the molecular biologists working on the DNA clocks and uniquely human cell types.

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But, like most scientists, we seldom discuss Gauguin’s third question: ‘Where are we going?’ (That would be mere ‘speculation.’ It is odd that this is depreciated but so it is.)

Yet our mind is not so much a storehouse of knowledge as it is an engine of exploration and prediction. Consciousness is, for the most part (A Brief History of the Mind, 2004), the generation of simulations about possible futures, enabling choices to be made, free will to be exercised. Emotion, what you use when there isn't time to think further, also serves as guidance for future courses of action and their associated risks.

My father was a Kansas City insurance executive in charge of underwriting before he became the COO, who had to evaluate risks in order to price the premiums. Some of that risk-evaluation stance seems to have rubbed off on me.

Atop that, I had several decades of close association with UW neurosurgeons as they evaluated patients and discussed their prospects, with and without intervention. Alternative futures and their risks were a constant topic in both grand rounds and in the daily departmental coffee room discussions.

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Futurists are mostly consultants to high-end executives. At the invitation of the Global Business Network in 1989, I hung out with the scenario-spinning futurists for several decades. Their meetings and tours provided me with repeated exposure to how business executives and government planners think before placing a big bet.

Futurists do not try to predict the outcome; rather, they try—usually focusing on a big multiyear project with delayed payoffs—to show the varied payoff paths possible and what might nudge a success trajectory into a failure mode.

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Then, on-and-off for the last few decades, I’ve hung out with those climate scientists who work on climate change—and expected consequences. They are mainly oceanographers and atmospheric scientists. For twenty years, the UW climate faculty have invited me to their Summer Institute. With my physics and computer modeling background, I can usually follow along. Being a basic scientist myself, I can often imagine how they think.

Originally, I was motivated to understand climate research by my interest in the three-fold brain enlargement and how climate change might have driven it, as climate change is what usually speeds up evolutionary processes.

By 2004, however, my climate interests became a matter of fascinated horror (Global Fever, 2008).

Lately, I’ve been using that climate education to think about how vulnerable we are to a sudden population crash–archaeology is full of such episodes—and what we can still do to avoid such failure modes of civilization (see Jared Diamond’s Collapse, 2011).

I don’t have the answers, but I do have an analysis of how we can go about getting them, with an urgent Manhattan Project for climate.

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This autobiographical snippet is from the introduction to a human evolution book, The Evolution of Us, whose first draft I set aside in 2018, along with several journal articles, to concentrate on climate matters.

[additional for book foreword]

That’s what has shaped my overview on all three of Gauguin’s questions, which I have framed here as a series of conversations with an interviewer. You’ll have to imagine us on stage, perching on two uncomfortable bar stools flanking a tall round cocktail table, on which reside two water bottles (only one of which contains water) and a scattering of my picture postcards. Once I start talking about climate shifts, you too might want to find a stiff drink for yourself.

W.H.C.