Learning

"To learn is to eliminate."

 Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man

I'm a student of learning. That's how I fell into storytelling, even parenthood, and it's why I teach. Honestly, I’m a little selfish – I wish to understand how people learn, so that I can help them. Us.

I also want to understand how I learn, because I recognize my mistakes and honestly wish to be of useful service to this life and planet. That brings up the bolder truth, which is that I’m interested in wrestling with what learning is at the scale of the planet - the evolution of life and adaptation in geological time.

That's a weird thing to say, so I welcome laughter and rolling of eyes. I like a good joke and a healthy ribbing. We should allow ourselves to make fun. But I’m serious too. I'm currently reading Stephen Jay Gould's book on the Cambrian explosion and it ties together some important concepts that are revealing, and I think relevant to learning in everyday life.

Gould is a Pulitzer Prize winning Harvard paleontologist who studies ancient life, life that is far more ancient than dinosaurs. The Cambrian explosion occurred about 540 million years ago when life forms, which previously had largely been single cell organisms, suddenly evolved into radically new multicellular creatures that, with one look, are obvious and visible as animals. Trilobites and that kind of thing.

These new animals left a rich and diverse fossil record, and what those fossils reveal is that Earth’s first creatures arrived with wild and almost chaotically diverse body plans. This is what Gould is emphasizing – far from a simple beginning that led to the increasing diversity of plant and animal life that we recognize today, it appears that life has frequently advanced quite the opposite way – with sudden eruptions of wild speculation and diversity followed by torrents of extinction.

All modern animals, including ourselves, are the descendants of but a handful of those first wild test runs. The vast majority went extinct.

We sometimes have a view of life where evolution (or the hand of God – whatever you like, I’m not particular here) is slowly refining organisms into richer, more diverse and complicated forms. Gould, using some important fossils, rejects that view. Life, he says, proceeds by “decimation and diversification.”

Why is this important?

If you know anything about brain development, you may know that babies are born with thousands and perhaps millions more synaptic nerve connections in their brains than adults. We are born, in a sense, with eyes wide open and more possibility than at any other time in our lives. Learning is largely an elimination of those synapses, by trial and error (hence the quote above). The body keeps those that are useful, discards those that are not, and our brains slim down to a much more user-friendly interface.

I’m simplifying a bit in order to be brief, but this has been extensively researched by neuroscientists and psychologists of early childhood.

Now, whales, fish eggs, and apples. If you’ve ever seen an apple tree fruit in autumn – maybe it occurred to you to wonder why an organism like a tree would give birth to so many babies, when it’s so obvious that most won’t survive. It almost seems wasteful. Huge stores of energy go into producing thousands and even millions of babies, some two or three of which survive.

If we look at biological patterns, we can discover this all over the place. Fish eggs. Sea turtles. Insects. Even human reproductive cells. The vast majority never see the light of day.

Many biological systems proceed like this, at least some of the time. There are other patterns too, but this process of overabundance and the subsequent extinction or death of so much is a pattern easily observed.

This may sound grim, but that’s not my point. I think we learn something here. Creativity appears to work like this too. We can think of far more things than we can actually follow up on or work with. And we’re not limited to working with the truth. We can tell all sorts of stories, paint all kinds of pictures, and they often have impact even when they’re fiction.

Somehow, this is how the earth is learning. Growing. Changing. Adapting. Mother Earth does not limit herself to a handful of choices and tend them like a patient gardener. She sows with wild and chaotic abandon. Most die. The ones that survive proceed.

I’m imperfect in trying to express this. It’s just an observation, and it surely contains some errors. But this pattern, which is biological, evolutionary, even neuronal, is visible all over the planet.

As humans, we often focus on choices or learning as being right or wrong, whether ethically, spiritually, scientifically, or more. We give a lot of attention to this, actually. I’m not doubting or questioning that. I’m so obviously governed by scientific, moral, and ethical choices. But from a sort of abstract point of view, learning (or adapting, growing, changing) seems to proceed on Earth by attempting a wide and almost chaotic variety of solutions, then seeing which ones work.

We might learn something of ourselves from this.