… and what does it have to do with a crow using a tool or the origin of life?
Chair [1]
“… The structured information on which the system runs is not carried in the description mechanism but in reality itself in the spatio-temporal world. The programme does not generate reality. Reality generates the programme, one whose description is retrievable, leading to the self-reproduction of the system under generally stable conditions. Thus in effect reality is it’s own programme. The abstract description is built into the material organization of reality, which as a result has some degree of intelligibility.” [2]
What is a chair? Well duh, is this a joke? Everyone knows what a chair is. Or do they? For one thing, chairs have a history. [3]
Humans are not very good at standing still for very long lengths of time. We have elaborate internal mechanisms to cool and pump blood to our large brains while upright. This pumping is driven by walking, running, or moving around while standing. Old French Foreign Legion films or US Cavalry films almost always have a scene where soldiers are punished by making them stand at attention in the blazing sun until they pass out. Humans rest by squatting on their heels or on their knees, or by sitting on the floor on carpets or cushions. A great deal of the world still sits this way. Sitting on a raised surface (a very general definition of a chair) allows an individual to see everyone sitting on the ground as well as everyone being able to see them. There is evidence of humans always taking care of the elderly and infirm. Raised sitting allows one to stand up easier. The modern history of chairs is primarily a western story although thrones were used by elites all over the world, the first known chairs were Egyptian thrones from around 3100 BC.
Imhotep on the throne [4]
Thrones are used as a signifier of hierarchy and used by elites to literally raise themselves above the masses. The earliest Roman divan is from around 700 BC and was used by the wealthiest for lounging. The Greeks were the first ones to use bench-style seating for the masses in their amphitheaters around 532 BC. This was later copied by the Romans. The first known objects that started to look like modern chairs were the Roman sella curulis and the Klismos chair from Greece.
Klismos chair from Greece [5]
Again, remember that these are objects of the elites, what common people used is largely unknown, maybe three-legged stools but we don’t know when this practice started although the Greeks had stools and there were one-legged stools used by artisans for carving stone. The first modern chair was first designed by the Italian cabinet maker Guiseppe Gaetano Descalzi in the town of Chiavari in 1807.
Chiavari chairs were given to Pope Leo XII in 1892 [6]
Thousands of these chairs were made but again these were objects created for elites to own. It was the industrial revolution in the 1840s that allowed for the mass production of chairs for everyone. Chairs started out as signifiers of status and power and as ways for the state to entertain the masses. Chairs caught on only in western society and the industrial revolution brought chair use to all classes. [7] Modern humans spend more time sitting than ever before leading to other blood flow problems, the pooling of blood in the feet. [8]
Chair Design [9]
It should be clear now that what a chair is can be many different objects. Defining a chair, I want to be as general as possible:
An object that allows a human to sit raised above the ground.
OK, that’s a start but this definition includes things like a fallen tree or a rock. Maybe a bit more specific:
An object made by humans that allows a human to sit raised above the ground.
A chair is what in the ontology of metaphysics is called an “ordinary object.” [10] [11] There is a great debate on whether common objects exist. [12] [13] Eliminativists say that no ordinary objects exist while Permissivists say that all objects exist. Conservatives say that most ordinary objects don’t exist but there are certain extraordinary objects that do exist, objects that cannot be replicated, like monotheistic Divine or Platonic forms. All of these positions have various arguments and counterexamples for and against, some of them quite interesting. If you scratch away some part of a chair will it still be a chair? Continuing the removal, at what point will it cease to be a chair? If you remove parts of a chair over the years and replace them with new ones will it still be the same chair? If you saved all those removed parts and built a second chair with them which is the true chair? To avoid this rabbit hole I first want to change the definition slightly, an object made by humans is an artifact, so a chair is:
An artifact that allows a human to sit raised above the ground.
An artifact can have the same issues of meaning and existence as ordinary objects so we must leave the metaphysical and look at artifacts as an epistemological problem, the knowledge of a chair, the design, the learned act of building, the passing on of this knowledge. [14] [15] The actual chair that I am sitting on is a physical instantiation of this collection of knowledge, this idea of a chair. In a branch of science, an ontology is a set of concepts, some descriptive, some mathematical, all endowed with a consensus of meaning within each branch. Sometimes it is possible to move across branches by finding a commonality of meaning.
Chairs can have quasi-biological lives [Author diagram]
The term ‘artifact’ comes from anthropology but can be used more generally in a biological sense. Dawkins called this the extended phenotype. [16] This generalized artifacts to all species, not just humans, an ant colony, or a bird’s nest. In Dawkins's view these artifacts were biological products, separate yet derived, genes alone provide the informational content for evolution. This quote from The Social Logic of Space supports this view:
“… Every society invests a certain proportion of its material resources not in the biological perpetuation of individuals, but in the reproduction of the global society by means of special biologically irrelevant behaviors which are aimed purely at the enactment of descriptions of the society as a whole…” [2]
I don’t agree that such behaviors are biologically irrelevant, I’m more inclined toward Lewontin’s view [17] that an organism and its environment are intertwined with each modifying the other.
Army ants building a bridge [18]
An ant colony is made up of many ants, each with a small subset of genetically encoded rules and behaviors. The whole colony, though, is something else. A colony can react swiftly to changes in its environment. Army ants don’t have permanent colonies, the colony moves from place to place taking larvae and their queen with them. A column of army ants is the colony. Thus they must respond in real-time. If the column reaches a cliff or a gap it starts building chains and even bridges of ant bodies. When the colony rests it forms a nest with its own bodies. The ability of a colony to respond and modify itself, and its behavior, resides in a network of dynamic interactions of the individual ants themselves. In addition, ant colonies tend to mature with time, the network becomes more stable to perturbations. This suggests that the network dynamics of the colony itself create a crude form of memory. Of course, it is the genetics of the daughters of the queen that are passed on, and of her mates. In some ant species, the new queens mate with more than one male and lay eggs for workers from one male and eggs for sexually active males and females from the other. It seems to be that the network memory of the colony is lost and each new queen starts off again from scratch. Calling ant chains and bridges artifacts may seem like stretching the concept and meaning a bit thin but think of large complex structures like termite mounds or wasp nests or bee hives or complex ant colonies built into the ground. [19]
I’m going to keep the term artifact and let the term tool be just a type of artifact. The various definitions of tools are very specialized. Basically, a tool is something an agent uses to better accomplish a task. Also, a tool is usually built by the agent or the agent’s group. Humans are said to be the only ones that build tools to build other tools. Is a chair a tool? Using a chair to stand on to reach the top of a closet or even me sitting in a chair writing this article, sounds like maybe a tool, but sitting at a kitchen table eating, maybe not. Like artifact, the term tool was first defined for talking about human use, not generally for other biological agents. Humans are part of Nature but we have some very unique properties. [20] How these properties evolved from some nonhuman common ancestor is still a great mystery. The only early tools that have survived are made of rock, crude tools some 3.3 million years ago, and better ones starting around 2.6 million years ago. [21] Tool usage changed slowly until Homo sapiens took this to an extreme. Some form of tool-like use has been found in primates, elephants, dolphins, fish, and birds. Tool-making requires cognitive skills to realize that some extension of an agent's body can create a successful outcome plus the cognitive skills to create this extension. [22]
A cognitive hierarchy of tool use. Only humans can make constructive tools. Great apes and crows can make secondary and sequential tools. [23]
Among birds, Corvids (crows) have been found to use tools the most, and New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) are the champs. The crows are endemic to a few islands in an island group called New Caledonia, northeast of Australia. Endemic species enter a new ecology and must adapt quickly if they are to survive. Many bird species have specialized beak shapes. Galapagos finches (18 species of passerine birds) have very plastic beak shapes and a diverse set of shapes are hatched each year. Due to a harsh varied climate, different foods needing different beak types to extract them are prevalent at different times so there are always some birds that are able to survive. New Caledonian crows don’t have the same diversity of beak shape but they can use tools to extract food from places their beaks can’t reach. They do, however, have a beak morphology different from other crows, one that allows them to manipulate tools. [24] Thus they fill an ecological niche that is open on the islands as there are no long-beaked bird species (like woodpeckers) present. [25] The Hawaiian crow, which is extinct in the wild but still exists in captivity, also has been found to use tools. [26] The crows make probes out of different materials, some tapered to a tip containing a hook or a bend. [27] [28] The crows probe holes in wood for larvae of the longhorn beetle (Agrianome fairmairei) among others. The probe agitates the larvae which bite the tip and are thus lifted out for consumption. Crows have eyes on each side of their head but NC crows can roll their eyes forwards to give themselves a form of stereoscopic vision when they are staring down holes. Thus they can estimate the depth of the hole. [29]
Crow uses a stick to probe for grubs [30]
Now it is time to introduce a new term, culture [31] Like artifacts and tools, culture has an anthropological origin and like the other terms, has been extended to other species. The main purpose of this is to find out just what is unique to humans and how this uniqueness came about. The first to talk about this was the French philosopher and early sociologist, Gabriel Ťarde in the late 1800s. [32] He saw two sometimes conflicting processes in human culture and in all life, imitation, and invention. Culture is an ever-changing creative process
(invention) that is maintained over generations by imitation, what is now called social learning. In biology, imitation is replication and invention is Darwinian evolution. Variation, the driver of evolution, comes from local effects and random errors. Behaviors, artifacts, tools, and cultures all exist within the framework of genetics but emerge from biological processes, for one thing, they have a longer life span than what is considered a single biological agent. There are both similarities and differences between say, two human cultures, and two different species. Those that study complexity tend to look more at the similarities. Chairs started out as signifiers of elites in various cultures but only in Western culture did chair usage expand to all levels of society. A new improved definition of a chair:
A cultural artifact that includes a set of design specifications and construction rules that are passed down through generations through social learning and instantiated as objects that humans sit on. New materials and designs arise regularly and are tested through individual or social acceptance.
There are many theories on how learning comes about but there are three main themes: [33]
learning comes about through active interaction with others (social learning)
learning comes about through an individual agent comparing a previous situation with a current one (cognitive learning)
leaning comes about through positive and negative reward (operant or behavioral) learning)
These are not exclusive and all three can exist. New Caledonian crows could be learning from the award they get from getting a rich food source, this would mean operant learning. Evidence that this is not true comes from juvenile play. Young New Caledonian crows carry around sticks in their beaks and it has nothing to do with food, just play. In fact, play could be considered an important part of social learning although it could also be considered cognitive. Proving social learning is another matter. In behavior, it is hard enough teasing out what is genetic and what is environmental so adding what is learned and how it is learned to the mix adds increased problems. In New Caledonian crows there is still a strong genetic component as young crows raised in isolation will develop skills to probe for hidden food on their own. On the other hand, these skills develop faster when learned in a social context, including interaction with humans. Other Corvid species that are not social cannot do nearly as many skills on the tool-making cognitive hierarchy. [34] Experimentally showed social learning has been more difficult with mixed results. New Caledonian crows in different locations use different plant types for their sticks and design them differently. The assumption is that the two requirements of culture, learning, and innovation, are present. The beginnings of culture are also thought to be found in chimps. Cultural artifacts are of course tightly related to the environment, to location, but even with weak proof of social learning, there is a sense that something is happening. One of the insights in ant studies is that the determination of an individual ant’s task is the result of the number of interactions with others doing that task which passes a certain threshold.
The group population structure of crows is called fission/fusion and is different depending on age and the current status of the breeding season. [35] Getting data on interactions of individual birds can be difficult and the time between readings is very coarse-grained, being in the range of 3 or 4 observations a day. Occasionally there is a technological breakthrough in science that expands greatly the data available, creating many new insights. In 2015 a paper called: Experimental resource pulses influence social-network dynamics and the potential for information flow in tool-using crows [36] was published. The authors use a new technology called a proximity logger, an electronic device that records in real-time when any other proximity logger is within a specified distance. These are small and can be attached to crows by a degradable harness. Thus it can record interactions between individuals. These didn’t have GPS so the network is not spatial but fixed base stations collecting signals and prior knowledge of each crow's kinship allowed them to establish that the crows formed two groups based loosely on the kin relationship. The crows mostly interacted within their own groups except for a period of one hour after dawn where there were many unique interactions. This period, called the Dawn Chorus, is a time of very interesting behavior in birds. The researchers performed an experiment where they simulated the fall of a dead candlewood tree (Aleurites moluccana) full of grubs in each of the two groups and in between them. The one in the middle didn’t result in any activity but the ones within the groups created a pulse of activity both within the group it fell in and also the other group. When a resource pulse occurred birds from the out-group were allowed to feed and were not chased away. After the resource was used up the network returned to what it was before. These experiments showed that information normally stayed within the kinship groups except for that hour after dawn and when there was a sudden bounty of food. The research did not specifically show social learning yet the authors suggest that perhaps the normal exclusive in group contact is perhaps a driver of distinct cultures among the birds. Like the ants, this points to some sort of network effect arising out of the genetic framework, separate but tightly bound to it. How does this work? Well, we are just starting to understand the dynamics of networks.
The astute reader has perhaps noticed that I haven’t said anything about the origin of life. The astrobiologist Betül Kaçar [37] states five tightly coupled operational disciplines for studying the origin of life:
chemical
physical
informatic
computational
biological
Biology had to start somewhere as we know there was a time on earth before biology. How biology arose, no one really knows. It is a common game in the origin of life research to play which came first, membranes, metabolism, genetics, or replication. The earth scientist Robert M. Hazen [38] has said that the study of the origin of life requires both top-down (biology to nonbiology) and bottom-up (nonbiology to biology) studies. One says that the cell reads information from RNA copied from DNA and makes proteins. What is information? Is this just as weird as saying: What is a chair? Is information a common object? Or even an object?
Genetic Code [39]
RNA is turned into proteins using three letters (codons) of a four-letter genetic code. There are thus four by four by four combinations or 64 different codons. The codons code for 20 proteins, one start codon, and three stop codons. The genetic code is redundant, there is enough redundancy to reduce errors yet enough difference to allow for variation. Variation drives Darwinian evolution. Through these processes, life explores possibilities for survival and expansion into different environments; imitation and invention. The genetic code binds the storage to the final product; informatics, sender to receiver. The information structure, be it a gene or a species or a colony, nest, kinship group, culture, or even a chair; reside in the realm of computation. To hold information structure together, to modify and translate, there must be computation.
There is an idea in biology called folk biology. Ordinary people know what things are. They know what a dog is although dogs come in a wide range of sizes, colors, and shapes. Hunter gatherer societies know what a species is to the level of any trained naturalist yet defining the term species in biology is an ongoing struggle. So to with other terms like gene or even individual. There is a problem with meaning, we know what objects are but when we delve into meaning all sorts of issues appear. So we drop meaning and look at knowledge. How do we have knowledge of an object? This sets off a thought process that seems to end with one word, information, then we stop. The word itself has become a common object and thus meaningless. But we know what it is. Physics has specialized definitions for information but these don’t quite do the trick. I like the term: “coherent structure”, which I borrowed from Lagrangian coherent structure, a term in fluid mechanics. It must have several highly interlocking features: self-replication
instantiation – it exists in space and time
self-replication
evolution – selection over variation
informatics – exists in a coded (abstract) physical form within the structure
computation self-replication– invention
These define biological processes including extended phenotypes. These are very much like Kaçar’s categories. The problem is bottom-up, finding a path from the nonbiological to the biological. Take a Lagrangian coherent structure, a vortex street. It does exist in space and time from a few seconds to much longer in say, Jupiter. It replicates but doesn’t self-replicate. It replicates in the state of the larger dynamics. No evolution is present. Coded in the larger state of the dynamics. No computation although any oscillatory process defines a crude clock, one requirement of memory. So a vortex street is not biological. But it is coherent because I know what it is.
What is a chair? Pass it on.
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