Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – May 22, 2006.

Intelligently Designed: More on the Lateral Spread of Information

Greetings from Vermillion, South Dakota—home of the National Music Museum on the campus of the University of South Dakota. The Museum resides in an original Carnegie Library building. It is by all odds the largest and finest collection of musical instruments in our hemisphere—and indeed one of the finest in all the world.

I am here to attend a gathering of musical instrument scholars—a joint international meeting of the American Musical Instrument Society (AMIS); its equivalent in Great Britain—the Galpin Society; and an international association of musical instrument collections. I am happy to announce that on Saturday (May 20, 2006), I attended my first meeting as a newly elected "governor" of AMIS. I have been meeting with old friends, making new ones—and horse trading—or, more accurately, exchanging instruments with other collectors.

But what particularly drives my interest in the details of the history of musical instruments—especially my own favorite group of instruments, the piston-valved cornets—is my interest in the "evolution" of human-designed artifacts: as explained in previous blogs, I am determined to explore the processes of material cultural evolution—and to understand the degree to which they are the same as, and especially the way in which they differ from, processes of biological evolution.

If evolution is the effect of the external environment (specifically, the economic milieu) on the transmission of information, it follows that the mode(s) of transmission of information in the two systems underlie much of their similarities and differences. In biological systems, organisms overwhelmingly transfer genetic information vertically—from parent to offspring. But there are important exceptions: bacteria are notorious for spreading genetic information horizontally—when bacteria of completely different groups exchange genetic information. And certain groups of plants (like the rose family) are known to hybridize freely. But vertical transmission also prevails in bacteria and roses—and overall remains the dominant mode of information transfer in biological systems.

So, too, do teachers and parents pass on their knowledge vertically to younger people. But the distinction between vertical and horizontal spread of information in human society quickly blurs: I have learned a lot from my kids and other young people—some in my profession, some not. In general, despite its banality, you learn something you didn't know before every time you turn on your radio or tv—something about the weather, last night's baseball results, or someone's idea about the real reason we went to war in Iraq. This is instant horizontal transmission of ideas and "facts"—all of it "information."

The papers presented so far at this meeting have been generally excellent. Sitting there in an auditorium, I am on the receiving end of the horizontal transmission of information which my brain is constantly sorting through, looking for examples and insights into what I myself am interested in: how information on the construction of musical instruments other than my own cornets either remains stable—or changes over time. And why that may be so. I have heard a paper that invokes mystical (including religious) symbolism as the basis of design of some stringed instruments—an interesting gambit, as it eschews the usual hypothesis that an instrument's design reflects its optimum shape for producing music. Another paper discussed how communism in Romania systematically stamped out aspects of folk music traditions—and forever altered the way instruments are made. And I heard a paper discussing how simple folk traditions of the past tend to reflect vertical transmission of ideas more than horizontal pathways (meaning that biological techniques of analyzing history are applicable to such systems)—but that modern manufacture of complex instruments involves so much horizontal transfer of information (including "theft of idea" between rival makers) that such techniques are dismal failures in trying to sort out the details of "evolutionary" history of such systems. In this case, the paper was presented by my colleague Ilya Temkin of the American Museum of Naturaly History of New York; his example of a complex system was derived from my cornet data base—so of course I already knew what Ilya was going to say. But, then again, there were still nuances pertaining to his system of psalteries—and even to my cornets—that I saw in a fresh light during his talk.

That evening we had a special treat: A Native American demonstration of music, dancing and singing accompanying a traditional South Dakota pig roast. The Native Americans involved were predominantly Lakota Sioux—though members of other tribes from elsewhere in the American west were also present. Thus the music and dance was an amalgam of traditions—though as I understand it, the traditions have not been blended. But otherwise there was plenty of evidence of the horizontal transfer of information: what anthropologists call "syncretism," or the adoption of aspects of one cultural tradition by another. For example, the opening ceremony was a presentation of flags—not a traditional Native American ceremony, according to the master of ceremonies—but rather one derived from Euro-American sources. The two leaders each carried a standard: one was a traditional pole that was placed in the center of the grassy arena—around which much of the dancing took place. But the other standard was an American flag—albeit an unusual one, overlaid as it was with an image of a Native American.

One of the women dancers was wearing what seemed to me to be a form of "prairie dress" derived from European-American settlers—rather than from Native American traditions. And, when the non-Native American meeting attendees were invited to join in the dancing, once again we saw the instant spread of information—however imperfect it might have been.

It is this lateral spread of ideas that makes human social systems so incredibly more complex than biological systems—complex as they themselves are! But I am learning more here in South Dakota in a few days than months of solitary contemplation of my cornets could possibly reveal about the nature of material cultural evolution. My basic data are important—yet it is the stimulation that comes from learning about the data and thoughts of others that really leads to new advances in thinking.

Niles Eldredge

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