This first entry should explain the hows and whys behind this obscenely weird and long blog name. In brief hypothesislessness describes the state in which we as scientist sometimes find ourselves when we are facing a new problem nobody else worked on before.
This status became very apparent to me in a very special meeting of the Evolution of Intelligence group here at BEACON MSU.
We address two questions: How did intelligence evolve, and how can we use evolution to create an intelligence. And we are not the only ones doing it, and we are not the only ones who think they work on these questions. I have to point out that we have a very heavy emphasis on doing actual evolution. And instead of trying to reconstruct evolutionary events and how evolution might have happened and how it shaped the beings around us in the process, we evolve things or beings and ask what parameters influence evolution and how that might be used in engineering. When other scientist do their work, they normally work in a well established field, that contains tons of concepts and testable hypothesis. But I think we are in a very different situation. In most cases we study how basic behavior like motion, migration, swarming, navigation, or cooperation evolved. And quite frankly, I know nobody who witnessed any of this. Of have you been around when the first amoeba stretched here first lamelopodium? Of when the first cells started to cling together? Or maybe you know which insect first laid the egg of a worker minion? What most people do is look at a system that is, and try to answer the question "how it came about". What we do is using a system that evolves into doing something and we observe how it happened, and see which parameters influence the outcome. But there are no hypothesis about these kind of processes. There are vague ideas of how something happened in species X and that maybe factor Y was required. I am in a state of hypothesislessness, I don't know what hypothesis to test in the evolution of intelligence. I find myself in a situation where I have the tools to observe something nobody else ever looked at, and I might be able to make profound statements about the situation we are currently in and the inner workings of everything living all around us, and at the same time I get the impression that science missed this field entirely. To give an example: Bee swarming. Of cause bees evolved to swarm coming from a non swarming ancestor. And yes, scientists have good ideas how bees became what they are. But they are unable to make any kind of experiment in a biological system that even remotely incorporates actual evolution. For that you would need to make an evolutionary experiment with non swarming bees (or bee ancestors) make them swarm, and test which conditions where conducive. Good luck! It would take the time the entire humankind took from the upright first step to now to pull of this experiment. It can't be done. Or can it? We can evolve virtual critters to swarm. I have done that, it is surprisingly simple, and I can test parameters until I am blue in the face. Did I learn something about bees? Most likely yes, if I take my results and make generalizations about actual bees, I might come up with a couple of hypothesis, which will be very hard to test in the actual system. Still I can use experimental computational simulations to generate testable hypothesis. But do I find nice testable hypothesis in Biology that I can test? No, because Biologists can't make such an experiment and therefor they don't think about hypothesis testable in this manner. I want to turn this around. I want to use our computational evolutionary systems, which because they implement evolution rather than simulating them, and thus are an instance of evolution and therefor allow to test hypothesis, to actually test biological hypothesis. I don't want to generate hypothesis that Biologist might or might not be able to test, I want to test their hypothesis, and I have a hard time finding them - I am hypothesisless.
Of cause I am exaggerating. I trying to provoke a discussion. I want you to tell me that I am wrong, and that there are tons of biological hypothesis in the field of evolutionary intelligence and behavioral science I can test in my computational systems. And I am also fully aware that testing hypothesis in the best case creates new testable hypothesis. But I think we are not using our tools efficiently. Evolving some form of behavior and coming up with ideas how it might have happened in nature just to find out that we can impossibly test them in the wild frustrates me. Let's turn the board around, and let me test your hypothesis for a while.
Cheers Arend
