I’m going around the world giving talks about Darwin, and usually what I’m talking about is Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning. Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic, an early critic, and this is a passage that I just love, and would like to read for you.
Putujem svijetom držeći predavanja o Darwinu i obično govorim o Darwinovoj čudnoj izvrnutoj logici. Zapravo, to je tako nazvao jedan njegov rani kritičar, a ovo je odlomak koji mi se sviđa i kojeg bih vam pročitao.
"In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found on careful examination to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin’s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill."
"U teoriji koju upravo razmatramo, Apsolutno Neznanje svemu daje oblik; stoga možemo izvesti zaključak kako je temeljno načelo cijelog sustava da radi stvaranja savršenog i prekrasnog stroja, nije potrebno znati kako ga stvoriti. No pažljivo razmatranje ove tvrdnje okrit će nam da ona u sažetom obliku, krije osnovnu namjeru Teorije, i da u nekoliko riječi izražava sve što g. Darwin govori; jer on, čudnim izvrtanjem logike, izgleda misli da je Apsolutno Neznanje potpuno sposobno zauzeti mjesto Apsolutne Mudrosti u postignućima stvaralačke vještine."
Exactly. Exactly. And it is a strange inversion. A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it: "Test Two: Do you know of any building that didn’t have a builder? Yes/No. Do you know of any painting that didn’t have a painter? Yes/No. Do you know of any car that didn’t have a maker? Yes/No. If you answered 'Yes' for any of the above, give details."
Točno. Upravo tako. A to i jest čudno izvrtanje. Jedan kreacionistički pamflet sadrži ovu prekrasnu stranicu: "Test broj dva: Znate li za neku građevinu koja nije imala graditelja? DA - NE. Znate li za neku sliku koja nije imala slikara? DA - NE. Znate li za neki auto koji nije imao proizvođača? DA - NE. Ako ste odgovorili "DA" na bilo koje pitanje, molimo obrazložite."
A-ha! I mean, it really is a strange inversion of reasoning. You would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer. But Darwin shows that it’s just false.
Aha! Mislim, to je stvarno čudno izvrtanje logike. Naizgled je logično da dizajn treba inteligentnog dizajnera. Ali Darwin pokazuje da to jednostavno pogrešno.
Today, though, I’m going to talk about Darwin’s other strange inversion, which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important. It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they’re so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny.
No danas ću govoriti o drugom Darwinovom čudnom izvrtanju, koje je na prvi pogled isto toliko zagonetno, ali neki način jednako važno. Logično je da čokoladni kolač volimo zato što je sladak. Momci naganjaju djevojke poput ovih jer su im seksi. Obožavamo bebe jer su tako ljupke. I, naravno, vicevi nas zabavljaju jer su smješni.
This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. Let’s start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector, because sugar is high energy, and it’s just been wired up to the preferer, to put it very crudely, and that’s why we like sugar. Honey is sweet because we like it, not "we like it because honey is sweet." There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind, you wouldn’t see why they tasted sweet. You have to look in our brains to understand why they’re sweet. So if you think first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness, you’ve got it backwards; that’s just wrong. It’s the other way round. Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved.
To je sve naopako. Jest. I Darwin nam objašnjava zašto. Krenimo sa slatkim. Naš poriv za slatkim je u stvari evoluirani detektor šećera, obzirom da je šećer visoko kaloričan, i samo je uštekan prije svih ostalih, da kažem to krajnje pojednostavljeno, i zato volimo šećer. Med je sladak zato što ga volimo, a ne.... "mi volimo med jer je sladak". Med nije sladak sam po sebi. I da do besvjesti izučavate molekule glukoze, vi nećete doznati zašto im je okus sladak. Da biste razumjeli zašto su slatke, vi morate proučiti naše mozgove. Stoga, ako mislite da je nešto prvo bilo slatko, pa da smo onda evoluirali da volimo slatkoću, naopako ste to shvatili; to je jednostavno pogrešno. Obrnuto je. Slatkoća je nastala evolucijom veze detektora i mozga.
And there’s nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies. And it’s a good thing that there isn’t, because if there were, then Mother Nature would have a problem: How on earth do you get chimps to mate? Now you might think, ah, there’s a solution: hallucinations. That would be one way of doing it, but there’s a quicker way. Just wire the chimps up to love that look, and apparently they do. That’s all there is to it. Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways. We became bald-bodied, oddly enough; for one reason or another, they didn’t. If we hadn’t, then probably this would be the height of sexiness.
A ove mlade dame nisu same po sebi seksi. I dobro je da nisu, jer da jesu, onda bi Majka Priroda imala problem: Kako, zaboga, natjerati čimpanze na parenje? Vi biste možda rekli, ali postoji rješenje: halucinacije. Moglo bi se to i tako izvesti, ali postoji brži put. Povezati čimpanzama osjetila i mozak tako da vole takav izgled, a čini se da i vole. I to je sve što ima u tome. Tijekom 6 miliona godina, mi i čimpanze evoluirali smo u različitim smjerovima. Mi smo postali bezdlaki, začudo, zbog ovog ili onog razloga; oni nisu. Da nismo, najvjerovatnije bi nam ovo bilo izuzetno seksi.
Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food. It wasn’t designed for chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus. The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen, who did his famous experiments with gulls, where he found that that orange spot on the gull’s beak -- if he made a bigger, oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder. It was a hyperstimulus for them, and they loved it. What we see with, say, chocolate cake is it’s a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring. And there are lots of supernormal stimuli; chocolate cake is one. There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness.
Naš poriv za slatkim je evoluirana i instinktivna sklonost namirnicama s puno energije. Nije bio dizajniran za čokoladni kolač. Čokoladni kolač je supernormalni stimulus. Ovaj izraz dugujemo Niku Tinbergenu, koji je radio slavne pokuse s galebovima, prilikom čega je otkrio da ova narančasta točka na galebovom kljunu -- ako tu točku povećate i pojačate boju, onda će je ptići galebova još intenzivnije kljucati. To je za njih bio hiperstimulus, i obožavali su ga. Ono što mi doživljavamo, recimo, s čokoladnim kolačem također je supernormalni stimulus koji utječe na naše moždane veze. Postoji puno supernormalnih stimula; čokoladni kolač je samo primjer. Postoji mnogo supernormalnih stimula i za seksualnu privlačnost.
And there's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness. Here’s a pretty good example. It’s important that we love babies, and that we not be put off by, say, messy diapers. So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing, and they do. And, by the way, a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby. So nature works on many levels here. But now, if babies didn’t look the way they do -- if babies looked like this, that’s what we would find adorable, that’s what we would find -- we would think, oh my goodness, do I ever want to hug that. This is the strange inversion.
A postoje i supernormalni stimuli za ljupkost. Evo jednog dosta dobrog primjera. Važno je da mi volimo bebe, i da nam se ne gade, na primjer, prljave pelene. Znači bebe moraju privlačiti našu naklonost i našu njegu, i one je privlače. I, uzgred rečeno, nedavno istraživanje pokazalo je da majke više vole miris prljavih pelena vlastitoga djeteta. Vidimo da Priroda djeluje na mnogim razinama. Ali čak i kada bebe ne bi izgledale tako kako izgledaju, kada bi izgledale ovako, to bi bilo ono što bi mi smatrali vrijednim obožavanja, to bi nam bilo -- mislili bismo... o, božanstveno, kako želim to zagrliti. To je čudno izvrtanje.
Well now, finally what about funny. My answer is, it’s the same story, the same story. This is the hard one, the one that isn’t obvious. That’s why I leave it to the end. And I won’t be able to say too much about it. But you have to think evolutionarily, you have to think, what hard job that has to be done -- it’s dirty work, somebody’s got to do it -- is so important to give us such a powerful, inbuilt reward for it when we succeed. Now, I think we've found the answer -- I and a few of my colleagues. It’s a neural system that’s wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job. Our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging. Now I’m not going to have time to spell it all out, but I’ll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward. And what we’re doing is we’re using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off, by turning the knob on a joke -- now it’s not funny ... oh, now it’s funnier ... now we’ll turn a little bit more ... now it’s not funny -- in this way, we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain, the functional architecture of the brain.
I za kraj, a što je sa smiješnim? Moj odgovor je da je to ista priča, potpuno ista priča. Ovo je teško, ovo nije toliko očigledno. Zato sam to i ostavio za kraj. I neću vam moći baš puno reći o tome. Ali morate razmišljati evolucijski, morate razmisliti o tome koliko je teškog posla moralo biti odrađeno -- jer prljav je to posao, ali neko ga mora napraviti -- zbog toga je jako važno da dobijemo snažnu, automatsku nagradu kada uspijemo. Mislim da smo ja i nekoliko mojih kolega poznanika pronašli odgovor. Humor je neuralni sustav koji je povezan tako da nagrađuje mozak za obavljanje dosadnih administrativinih poslova. Naša auto-naljepnica za ovaj pogled je da je to "radost otklanjanja pogrešaka". Neću sada imati vremena da sve jasno izložim, ali reći ću da samo neke vrste otklanjanja pogrešaka dobivaju nagrade. A ono što mi činimo jest da humor korisimo kao neku vrstu neuroznanstvene sonde, uključujući i isključujući humor, okrečući potenciometar za šalu -- sad nije smješno... o, sad je smješnije... sad ćemo malo pojačati... sad nije smješno -- na ovaj način mi u stvari možemo naučiti nešto o konstrukciji mozga, funkcionalnoj arhitekturi mozga.
Matthew Hurley is the first author of this. We call it the Hurley Model. He’s a computer scientist, Reginald Adams a psychologist, and there I am, and we’re putting this together into a book. Thank you very much.
Matthew Hurley je prvi autor ovoga. Zovemo ga Hurleyev model. On je računalni znanstvenik, Reginald Adams je psiholog, a tu sam i ja, i mi od toga radimo knjigu. Puno vam hvala.