A Proposed Unified Theory of Human Nature
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | A Proposed Unified Theory of Human Nature |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Robert Marion LaFollette, Lou Ellen LaFollette |
| Keywords | thermodynamics, entropy, emergence, survival needs, competition, consciousness, general relativity, quantum mechanics |
| Published | 2010 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the NPA |
| Volume | 7 |
| Number | 2 |
| No. of pages | 17 |
| Pages | 692-708 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
This text is the abstract of a book, which is in preparation for publication. Evidence for various proposals about human nature is contained in the book.
Overview
This seventeen-page contribution to the Proceedings of the NPA (Long Beach, 2010) is the précis of a book-length argument by Robert Marion LaFollette, completed after his death with the assistance of Lou Ellen LaFollette. Its ambition is unusual for a physics conference paper: it proposes to derive human nature — motivation, social behaviour, morality, politics — from the two laws of thermodynamics plus a second principle the authors call emergence. The paper opens with two epigraphs, Einstein on classical thermodynamics as "the only physical theory of universal content" he was convinced would never be overthrown, and Eddington on the second law holding "the supreme position among the laws of Nature". Those quotations set the strategy: begin from the physical law the authors regard as least likely to be falsified, and reason upward.
From the first law the authors extract a corollary of their own: "In a Universe of finite energy and matter, some things necessarily exist to the exclusion of other things. Therefore, competition for existence is a core principle of our Universe." The second law then guarantees that no structure is permanent, so that the competition is not static but continually restirred. Living structures, being thermodynamic systems, must consume other structures to maintain order against entropy, which sharpens the competition further. The paper's departure from the mainstream is twofold. Against the biological orthodoxy of Richard Dawkins-style gene selfishness it insists that species-survival needs are causally real and not reducible to individual gene interest. Against the physical orthodoxy it argues that space and time are measures rather than actors, that gravity and inertia are emergent properties of mass, and that time dilation is not an acceptable explanatory hypothesis for the muon's extended lifetime.
The argument
Thermodynamics as the first pillar
Human beings, "as material members of our universe", are said to be constrained if not explained by physical law. The authors invoke Gibbs and standard biochemistry (Mathews, Van Holde and Ahern) for the point that living structures must continually expend energy to hold their form, and Peter Atkins' Four Laws Which Drive the Universe (2007) for the claim that entropy is what keeps the competitive pot stirred. Darwin is then read in three parts — evolution, natural selection, and the evidence of innate competitiveness in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals — with the third part singled out as "the most important part of his work, certainly the most neglected". Malthus supplies the multiplier: reproductive rates exceed resources.
Emergence as the second pillar
Emergence is defined narrowly as "the appearance of new and unpredictable properties at each new level of structural complexity". The periodic table is offered as a table of emergent properties. Once a property has emerged its behaviour is analysable and predictable, deterministically or probabilistically; only its first appearance is not. Wholes at one level become parts at the next, and "lower level laws constrain, but do not necessarily explain, higher level functioning" — which the authors take to make thoroughgoing reductionism untenable until science can explain origins. Crick's formulation is quoted approvingly: "A system has emergent properties if they are not possessed by its parts. In science, 'emergent' does not have mystical overtones."
A classification of survival needs
The paper's original contribution is a needs taxonomy in two sets. Individual survival need classes comprise the safety needs (constant, lifelong, reflexive, sited in the amygdala, served by fear and anger, subject to one-trial learning); the self-maintenance needs (lifelong but periodic, overseeing the organism's thermodynamic housekeeping, shut down during fight-or-flight); and the developmental needs (time-limited windows during which environmental input shapes later functioning). Species survival need classes comprise the reproductive needs and the needs associated with species-specific survival strategies — social behaviour, intelligence, migration, hibernation, fabrication. Species needs endanger the individual, so natural selection has fitted them with strong drives sufficient to override safety. The need to self-actualize is placed in a class of its own.
The system is explicitly set against Maslow's hierarchy. Maslow "specifically rejected competition" and made higher needs contingent on lower ones being met; here the classes compete, need conflict is normal, and outcomes are probabilistic. The authors' standing image for the conflict between safety and self-maintenance is "the tiger at the water hole" — Schrödinger's "lion at the water hole" in the 1956 Tarner Lectures.
Social behaviour, intelligence and choice
Wherever social behaviour emerges it is claimed to carry the same signature: dependence of the individual on the group, division of labour, a social hierarchy, a group behaviour code, communication, and a capacity for individual self-sacrifice. The last is used to explain altruism, heroism, suicide and war within one framework. Intelligence is defined as the ability to effect change on environmental information within a single generation, where DNA requires generations; the brain is the organ that does "just what the DNA does", only more promptly. Curiosity is treated as an attribute of intelligence, and its combination with self-sacrificial risk-taking is credited with human dominance.
Pavlov is rehabilitated at length: a dog salivating at a bell is offered as an animal model for the inappropriate affect characteristic of mental illness, and the authors ask what follows if conditioning occurs before the child can discriminate — generalised anxiety, they suggest. Edelman's theory of neuronal group selection, with its "value centers", is identified with their survival needs, and "neurons that fire together wire together" is read as a neurological operationalisation of Pavlov. Harlow's maternally deprived monkeys, Lorenz's imprinting goslings and the ewe that rejects a lamb whose smell is wrong supply the bonding examples, each analysed as a message with a channel (sight, smell, touch) and an error rate.
Physics: the closing section
The final third turns to physics, with the disclaimer that the authors have no expertise there. Reality is asserted to exist independent of the observer. Special relativity's E = Mc2 and M = E/c2 is called Einstein's unified theory; wave-particle behaviour in light is read as matter and energy interconverting, with Newton's Opticks Query 30 quoted in support. On general relativity the verdict is that it is "an extremely accurate picture of the geometric relationships of matter and energy in the cosmos, but that it errs as to the cause of that relationship. It is time and space that get jerked around by matter and energy, not the reverse." High velocity changes the measuring instruments — the matter — not fundamental time and space. Gravity and inertia are competitive emergent properties of mass that together maintain cosmic structure; black holes are speculated to be "inertial collapse rather than gravitational collapse" and to serve as "energy recycle bins of the universe". Verlinde's entropic gravity is cited as heading in the right direction, and Morton F. Spears' electrostatic derivation of G in Galilean Electrodynamics (March/April 2010) is called very promising. On quantum mechanics, the collapse of the state vector is proposed as "the prototype of all emergence", and Shannon's 1948 information measure, equating information with entropy, is floated as a general law operating at every level of complexity. Free will is located in the irreversibility of choice rather than in chance.
Assessment
What is genuinely attractive here is the discipline of the starting point. Rather than borrowing quantum vocabulary as metaphor, the authors pick the one physical law whose universality is least disputed and ask honestly what it entails for organisms. The corollary about finite energy forcing competition is a clean move, and the individual/species split in the needs taxonomy is a real analytic improvement on Maslow: it explains why drives that endanger the individual are equipped with the strongest internal compulsion, and why need conflict rather than orderly ascent is the normal human condition. The insistence that lower-level law constrains without explaining higher-level function is a defensible anti-reductionist position, and the treatment of developmental time windows is well supported by the animal literature the paper cites.
The difficulties are of two kinds. The first is structural: this is the abstract of a book, and nearly every substantive claim is deferred — "evidence is discussed in the book" recurs perhaps twenty times. The needs classification is therefore presented, not tested. No criterion is offered for individuating a need class, no prediction is made that could fail, and the claim that social behaviour always carries the same six characteristics wherever it emerges is asserted across bacteria, insects, birds and mammals without a case where it does not. Cultural and political conclusions — that "cultural diversity does not work over the long haul", the classification of societies by direction of power flow, the "primary Platonic error" — are drawn from the thermodynamic premises far faster than those premises can carry them.
The second concerns the physics. The cross-level analogies are the weakest link: fermion exclusion is likened to animal territoriality and boson statistics to sociality, but exclusion follows from antisymmetry of the wavefunction and has no content in common with territorial defence, so the resemblance carries no explanatory weight. The rejection of time dilation is asserted rather than derived — the muon's extended laboratory lifetime is granted as experimental fact, but the alternative offered ("frozen in time" by internal dynamics) is a phrase, not a mechanism, and it makes no quantitative prediction to set against the measured Lorentz-factor dependence of the decay rate, which holds over several orders of magnitude in muon storage rings. Likewise the proposal that black holes are inertial rather than gravitational collapse is offered without any account of what an inertial collapse would be dynamically, while the paper simultaneously accepts Hawking radiation and black-hole thermodynamics, which are derived within the general relativity whose causal reading it rejects. The suggestion that entropy is "a form of energy dedicated to the dissolution of structure" conflates a state function with an energy, and the closing speculation that a search for an opposing structure-creating energy might be answered by enthalpy misreads what an enthalpy term is. These are the marks of authors working outside their field, which they candidly say they are; the biological and psychological argument stands more or less independently of them.