Max Tegmark's evolutionary classification scheme

I read Max Tegmark's article in Scientific American promoting his book, Life 3.0.

Tegmark proposes the following classification scheme:

In summary, we can divide the development of life into three stages, distinguished by life’s ability to design itself:

• Life 1.0 (biological stage): evolves its hardware and software
• Life 2.0 (cultural stage): evolves its hardware, designs much of its software
• Life 3.0 (technological stage): designs its hardware and software

This isn't a classification scheme I have heard of before. Tegmark introduces the scheme by saying:

I find it helpful to classify life forms into three levels of sophistication: Life 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

My first reaction was that these categories were three of the floors in the Tower of Optimization classification scheme I proposed back in 2011.

My second reaction was that Tegmark's numbering scheme seems pseudoscientific. I named my tower floors, rather than numbering them to better allow for future insertions and deletions. However Tegmark only has three categories.

There's an existing literature on the major evolutionary transitions. To say that scientists don't agree with Tegmark's classification scheme seems like a big understatement to me. Numbering schemes seem rather premature.

In my essay, I at least cited some prior work in the field - while Tegmark doesn't seem to have any citations at all. Presumably Max Tegmark made this classification scheme up. It seems like an example of how not to perform scientific classification to me.

Cultural evolution and the future

One reason for developing a proper science of how culture evolves it to understand human social institutions, and then use this understanding to build better ones. We should have better educational, political, scientific, technological and religious institutions.

Human cultural evolution is the bleeding edge of evolution on the planet. Many of the current significant changes in the biosphere are due to it. Because cultural evolution itself is so important, its study is correspondingly significant. However until relatively recently, it was not being studied very scientifically, and an absolute basic requirement for any sensible study of cultural evolution - Darwinian evolutionary theory - was largely missing.

Thankfully that has changed over the last 40 years. In the mid-1970s scientists started looking at the topic and the field has been slowly snowballing since then. Part of the progress appears to be recent acceleration due to scientists getting on the internet and engaging in social networking activities. This has mostly made criticism easier and made misconceptions harder to sustain.

Science is intimately involved in predicting the future, and cultural evolution is the main science needed to predict future human evolution. So, what can be said? Here are four basic takeaway points:

• Synthetic life is here already. Before I learned about cultural evolution I thought that creating synthetic life would largely involve building self-reproducing robots, or virtual living systems capable of undergoing open-ended evolution. However non-DNA life forms are already out there in the wild undergoing their own open ended evolution. They live in symbiosis with humans in the form of human culture. I think that I first clearly articulated this point in 2008 - in my video/essay Synthetic life is here already. Our roles are thus not that of creators but rather nursemaids.

• A new kind of evolution. An important idea is that cultural evolution differs in some respects from the DNA evolution that preceded it. In next to no time, humans have conquered the globe and even landed on the moon. This is not evolution as normal, something new and different is going on. My 2008 video/essay A new kind of evolution covered this idea. The similarities and differences between cultural evolution and the largely DNA-based evolution that preceded it is a complex topic. One recent innovation is that evolution now involves intelligent design. Engineering is affecting both cultural evolution and the evolution of DNA-based creatures - but it illustrates one of the ways in which evolution itself is changing.

• Engineered future. The future is likely to be be engineered. Intelligent design leads to better and more flexible solutions than is produced by older evolutionary forces - and these will out-compete any lifeforms that don't make use of engineering. My 2008 video/essay The engineered future covers this idea.

• Memetic takeover A memetic takeover is likely to be imminent. DNA's near monopoly on high-fidelity information storage is over. The death knell for nature's one-size-fits all storage solution started with the evolution of brains. Progress accelerated with the evolution of culture, writing, printing and the internet. Now we can see that a one-size-fits all storage solution is not appropriate for living systems. Sometimes, random access is needed. Sometimes a read/write storage medium is appropriate. Storage should sometimes be volatile, and sometimes not. Power consumption and heat dissipation requirements can be quite variable. DNA storage meets only a few of these requirements and is currently hardly used at all by engineered systems. Most far future organisms are pretty unlikely to use DNA to store inherited information in. The idea is named after the genetic takeover of A. G. Cairns Smith. Here is my main memetic takeover page on the internet about this idea.

These points seem important. Some of them were forecast long ago - for example in the work of Teilhard de Chardin. Modern proponents of some of these ideas include Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil. However, understanding of these outcomes does not appear to be very widespread.

Future fertility

I think that most models of the demographic transition have human fertility continuing to fall globally - for some time to come. Recently I read a prediction - posted by Jason Collins - that fertility would rise. Here is Jason's post linking to his article: Fertility is going to go up.

I am pretty sceptical. At one point Jason confesses that he might be wrong, writing:

I’m the first to admit we could be wrong in the prediction of a fertility increase. What other shocks are still to come? Will the continually changing environment drown out the underlying evolutionary dynamics? Our instinct is that most of the shocks that can affect fertility have played out in the developed world – increased incomes, effective contraception, female choice and so on. But what further shocks could reduce fertility?

Here's my attempt at a list of the big fertility-reducing factors that currently still lie largely in the future:

• More engaging games;
• More engaging pornography;
• Sex with robots;
• Economic competition with machines;
• Chemically-induced orgasms;

Basically, memes have run rings around genes, reducing human fertility. IMO, this process shows no sign of stopping - or even slowing down. The argument that parasites rarely kill their hosts doesn't help much here - parasites can kill their hosts if they have multiple host types and aren't dependent on one particular host type. That will be the situation with intelligent machines - memes won't be dependent on human hosts any more - so they won't be forced to keep them around.

Overall, based on our current understanding of cultural evolution, it seems quite reasonable to model future human fertility as falling to zero. Fertility is going to go down. Jason's argument for the opposite conclusion seems to be based on DNA evolution. However, this is slow - by comparison with cultural evolution. You have to model cultural evolution to have much hope of predicting future changes.