The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

‘her’ ants. Ants are a virtually inexhaustible resource – she can always breed new ones to take the place of the ones that got eaten.
    The link between the ants and Hillary’s ‘anthilligence’ is emergent – felicitously, it operates across what we have termed ‘Ant Country’. The same action means one thing for the ants, but something quite different, and
transcendent
, for Hillary. Replace Hillary by yourself – your
self
, the ‘you’ that you feel is experiencing your thoughts – and ants by brain cells, and you’re contemplating the connection between mind and brain.
    Now
you’ve
gone self-referential.
    Neural networks are what the brain is built from, but there’s more to evolving a brain than just assembling big neural nets. Brains operate in terms of high-level ‘modules’ – a module for running, another for recognizing danger, another for putting the whole animal on the alert, and so on. Each such module is an emergent feature of a complex neural network, and it wasn’t designed: it evolved. Millions of years of evolution
trained
those modules to respond instantly and exquisitely.
    The modules aren’t separate. They share nerve cells, they overlap, they’re not necessarily a well-defined
region
in the brain – any more than ‘Vodafone’ is a well-defined
region
of the telephone network. According to Daniel Dennett, they are like a collection of demons, operating by ‘pandemonium’. They all shout, and at any given instant, whoever shouts loudest wins (quite a lot of the Internet has borrowed this design).
    Modern humanity has built a culture around those modules – an idea that we’ll explore later – and in so doing has subverted them to new purposes. The module for spotting lions has become, in part, a module for reading Discworld books. The module for sensing bodily movement has, in part, turned into one for doing certain kinds of mathematics – those parts of mechanics where a physical ‘feel’ for the problem may well be precisely that. Our culture has rebuilt our minds, and our minds have in turn rebuilt our culture, over and over again, in each generation.
    Such a radical restructuring must have simpler precursors. A key step towards the human mind was the invention of the nest. Before there were nests, baby organisms could carry out only very limited experiments in behaviour. If every time you try out a new game you get gobbled up by a python, novelty will not carry a premium. In the comfort and relative safety of the nest, however, the
error
part of trial-and-error is no longer automatically fatal. Nests let you play, and play lets you explore the phase space of possible behaviours and find new, sometimes useful, strategies. Further along the same path lies the family, the pack, and the tribe, with certain shared behaviours and mutual protection. Meerkats, a kind of mongoose, have an intricate tribal structure, and take turns doing the dangerous (because more exposed) job of Lookout.
    Humans have turned such tactics into a global strategy: adults devote huge amounts of time, energy, food, and money to the task of bringing up their children. Intelligence is both a consequence of this brilliantly successful strategy, and a cause.
    The Dean would be well advised to take this link between family life and intelligence into account. He’s trying to educate the apes by the direct route (R … O … C … K …) but all they have on their tiny minds is S-E-X. Many school teachers will sympathize … but if only he realized that sexual bonding is a major factor in humanoid family life, and family life engenders intelligence …
    Bonobos are the perfect model for the Dean’s sex-mad apes. They are promiscuous in the extreme, making use of sex where we would be content with a smile and a wave or a gentlemanly handshake. Female bonobos have serial sex with dozens of males, or with females , almost in passing; the males do likewise. Adults engage in sexual activities with children, too. It all seems very casual. It helps bond the tribe. For them it seems to work fine.
    Ordinary chimps are promiscuous by the standards of orthodox human morality, though probably no more than many humans are. Pairs of males and females will disappear together for a few days, and then form new partnerships … Humans generally mate for life (a term meaning ‘until we get fed up’) and one reason is the enormous amount of effort that a human couple must put into raising the kids. Sex helps to