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.
Širom sveta držim predavanja o Darvinu, i uglavnom objašnjavam čudno izvrtanje Darvinovog rezonovanja. Taj naslov, ta fraza potiče od kritičara, ranih kritičara, a ovo je pasus koji ja obožavam i sada ću vam ga pročitati.
"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 sa kojom treba da se nosimo, Apsolutno Neznanje je glavni tvorac, tako da treba jasno da naglasimo osnovni princip čitavog sistema, a to je da preduslov za pravljenje savršene i lepe mašine nije u tome da znamo kako da je napravimo. Putem pažljive analize dolazimo do toga da ovaj predlog iznosi u suštinskoj formi osnovnu pogrešku Teorije, i ispoljava u nekoliko reči značenje gospodina Darvina, a on čudnim izokretanjem rezonovanja, izgleda da smatra da je Apsolutno Neznanje potpuno kvalifikovano da preuzme mesto Apsolutnoj Mudrosti u dostignućima kreativnih veština."
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."
Tačno. Tačno. To jeste čudno izokretanje. Brošura kreacionista sadrži ovu divnu stranu: "Test broj dva: da li znate za zgradu bez graditelja? Da/Ne. Da li znate za sliku koju niko nije naslikao? Da/Ne. Da li znate za bilo koja kola koja nije inženjer napravio? Da/Ne. Ukoliko ste odgovorili sa "Da" na bilo koje od pitanja, pružite objašnjenje."
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! Zaista smatram da je ovo čudno izvrtanje logike. Pomislili biste da je razumno smatrati da stvaranje zahteva inteligentnog stvaraoca. Ali Darvin nam pokazuje da je to prosto 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.
Danas ću, doduše, pričati o drugom čudnom izvrtanju Darvinove teorije, koje je na prvi pogled, jednako zagonetno, ali iz mnogo razloga jednako važno. Podrazumeva se da volimo čokoladu zato što je slatka. Muškarcima se sviđaju ovakve devojke jer su seksi. Obožavamo bebe jer su simpatične. I, naravno, šale nas zabavljaju jer su smešne.
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 postavljeno unatraške. Zaista. Darvin pokazuje i zašto. Počnimo sa slatkišima. Naša želja za slatkišima je složena forma detektora šećera; šećer sadrži mnogo energije i mi smo samo programirani da nam se to sviđa, grubo rečeno, usled toga volimo šećer. Med je sladak jer nam je to ukusno, a ne "ukusan nam je jer je sladak." Ne postoji ništa što je samo po sebi slatko kod meda. Ukoliko biste posmatrali molekule glukoze dok ne oslepite, ne biste uvideli zašto imaju ukus slatkog. Morate da analizirate naš mozak da biste shvatili zašto je to slatko. Ako mislite da je prvo postojalo slatko, a da smo evoluirali nakon toga da nam se to sviđa, pogrešno ste to shvatili, to je pogrešno. Dešava se upravo suprotno. Osećaj slatkog je rođen sa programom koji je evoluirao.
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.
Ne postoji ništa kod ovih dama što je samo po sebi seksi. Dobro je što je tako, jer da nije, majka priroda bi imala problem: Kako biste naterali šimpanze da se razmnožavaju? Možda ste pomislili, aha, rešenje je u halucinacijama. To jeste jedno od rešenja, ali postoji i bolje rešenje. Samo programirajte šimpanze tako da im se takav izgled sviđa, i očigledno je da im se sviđa. To je sve. Tokom šest miliona godina, mi i šimpanze smo evoluirali na različite načine. Mi smo postali ćosavi, što je čudno, iz ovog ili onog razloga, a one nisu. Da nismo, onda bi ovo verovatno bio uzor seksipila.
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.
Naša želja za slatkišima je usavršena i instinktivna želja za hranom visokog sadržaja energije. Nije izumljena zbog čokoladne torte. Čokoladna torta je supernormalni stimulus. Ovaj termin je iskovao Niko Tinbergen, koji je uradio čuvene eksperimente na galebovima i otkrio je da ukoliko uveličate narandžastu tačku na kljunu, učinite je upadljivijom ženke galebova će čak snažnije kljucati po njoj. To je prosto njima bio hiperstimulus, i obožavali su to. Ono što možemo uočiti kod recimo torte od čokolade je da je to supernormalni stimulus koji poboljšava naš ugrađeni program. Postoji mnogo supernormalnih stimulusa, torta od čokolade je jedan. Seksipil se odlikuje mnogim supernormalnim stimulusima.
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.
Čak i kod simpatičnih fenomena postoje supernormalni stimulusi. Evo jednog dobrog primera. Važno je da volimo bebe i da nas, na primer, ne odbijaju prljave pelene. Bebe moraju da privuku našu pristrasnost i brigu, i to i čine. Uzgred, skorašnja studija je pokazala da majke više vole miris prljavih pelena svojih beba. Tako da priroda ovde deluje na mnogo nivoa. Sada, kada bebe ne bi izgledale kako izgledaju, i ukoliko bi izgledale ovako, onda bi nama to bilo simpatično, to je ono što bismo smatrali - misllili bismo, oh, Bože, da li želim ikada da zagrlim ovo. 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.
Sada, napokon o smešnom. Moj odgovor je u stvari ista priča. To je teško, to je nešto što nije očigledno. Zato sam to ostavio za kraj. Neću moći da kažem previše o tome. Morate to da posmatrate sa evolutivnog aspekta, morate da razmilite o teškom poslu koji treba uraditi, to je prljav posao, neko mora da ga završi, zato je važno da doživimo moćnu, urođenu nagradu za to kada uspemo. Mislim da smo došli do odgovora, ja i nekoliko mojih kolega. To je neuralni sistem koji je uspostavljen kako bi nagradio mozak za obavljanje prljavog, činovničkog posla. Naš slogan za ovaj pogled je da je to radost koju donosi otklanjanje grešaka. Nemam vremena da vam sve to predstavim, ali mogu vam reći da se samo određeni tipovi otklanjanja grešaka nagrađuju. Mi prosto koristimo humor kao neuro-naučni test tako što uključujemo i isključujemo humor, tako što pritiskamo dugme na šali, sada nije zabavno, oh, sada je zabavnije, sada ćemo podesiti to još malo..sada nije zabavno, i radeći to mi ustvari možemo naučiti nešto o samoj arhitekturi mozga, o 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.
Autor ovoga je Metju Harli. To nazivamo Harlijevim modelom. On je informatičar, Redžinald Adams je psiholog, i ono sam ja, i pišemo knjigu o svemu tome. Mnogo vam hvala.