Vibrations

Samual Butler: “All thinking is of disturbance, dynamical, a state of unrest tending towards equilibrium.”

In Vibrations (1885), Samuel Butler reflects that he had made three contributions to the theory of evolution:

(1.) In Life and Habit (1877) Butler had established the relation between heredity and memory.

(2.) In Evolution Old and New (1879) he had reintroduced teleology into organic life

(3.) In Unconscious Memory (1880) he had suggested an explanation of the physics of memory and made a connection between consciousness and evolution.

The theory of vibrations, which is outlined in Butler's Notebooks (1885), represents an extension of Butler’s evolutionary scheme. Charles Darwin had proposed natural selection but was unable to explained how natural selection occurs. How are units of inheretence transmitted? Darwin had put forward the theory of pangenesis, which proposed that genetic characteristics are past on through generations by particles of inheritance called gemmules. Darwin suggested that an organism’s environment could cause modifications to the gemmules which are passed through the genitals of the parent to the next generation (this was a modification of La Marck's theory and an an adaptation of a similar theory by Herbert Spencer. The theory had some credibility in the 19th century but continued to lose ground ground. In 1900 the theory became obsolete following the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work from the 1860s. Mendel had studied the reproductive behaviour of plants over generations and identified units of heredity (which he called “factors”). William Bateson (Gregory Bateson’s father) adopted the term genes for these units of heredity. This led to the eventual discovery of the encoded script within all living organisms known as chromosomes.

But we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. In 1885 (twenty-five years after Mendel had done his work on units of heredity, which remained undiscovered) Butler is struggling with the problem of how information is transferred from one organism to another. He intuits that it has something to do with information, but what could the medium of transmission be?

Butler hypothesises that there is a universal substance which runs through everything and which, vibrating at different frequencies, takes on different forms. In Butler’s words: “[…] the characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given time will determine whether it will appear to us as (say) hydrogen, or sodium, or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the other.” The universal substance has some relation to the notion of Luminiferous aether, the substance that was believed to act as a medium through which light waves passed and which will later, in the popular imagination become the medium for any ineffable thing (including radio waves).

Butler imagined the universal substance to be in a state of vibration. This vibration constitutes matter itself and the character of the vibrations constitutes particular kinds of matter. Butler notes that the Universal Substance is both “mental and physical’ (given that mind extends beyond discreet entities) and is mediated through action. In Butler the vibrations constitute a network of communication which establish patterns and these patterns establish the conditions for reproduction and adaptation: “May we imagine” writes Butler “that some vibrations vibrate with a rhythm which has a tendency to recur like the figures in a recurring decimal, and that here we have the origin of the reproductive system?”

Vibrations and the Universal Substance: Butler, William and Gregory Bateson

Frequency variation in zebra stripes

In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson makes a connection between his father and Samuel Butler which identifies difference as modulations of communication both in nature and in human communication:

“My father was a geneticist, and he used to say, ‘It's all vibrations,’ and to illustrate this he would point out that the striping of the common zebra is an octave higher than that of Grevy's zebra. While it is true that in this particular case the ‘frequency’ is doubled, I don't think that it is entirely a matter of vibrations as he endeavoured to explain it. Rather, he was trying to say that it is all a matter of the sort of modifications which could be expected among systems whose determinants are not a matter of physics in the crude sense, but a matter of messages and modulated systems of messages. It is worth noting, too, that perhaps organic forms are beautiful to us and the systematic biologist can find aesthetic satisfaction in the differences between related organisms simply because the differences are due to modulations of communication, while we ourselves are both organisms who communicate and whose forms are determined by constellations of genetic messages.”

A decade later, in one of Gregory Bateson’s last texts, he acknowledges that he and his father had been following the same course in relation to biological and mental variation, which both operated under the order of difference:

“[…] if we separate off, for the sake of enquiry, the world of mental process from the world of cause and matter, what will the world of mental process look like? And [the elder Bateson] would have called it, I think, the laws of biological variation, and I would be willing to accept that title for what I am doing, including, perhaps, both biological and mental variation, lest we ever forget that thinking is mental variation.” 7

Samual Butler who used the term ‘vibrations’ to account for relations between factors that would later be interpreted as negentropic. Gregory Bateson identified a continuity of enquiry between Butler, his father and himself which circled around the problematic of systemic order, and which is resolved by a cybernetic reading of homeostasis and negentropy (the communication of variation): “We (a thin line of thinkers from Lamark, to Fechner, to Samual Butler, to William Bateson) knew that mind must in some way enter into the larger scheme of explanation. We knew that ultimately the theory of evolution must become identical with a resolution of the body/mind problem.”8

WILLIAM BATESON – Evolution, Information and Energy PROBLEMS OF GENETICS

In 1906 Gregory Bateson’s father, William Bateson wrote:

“We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing. The orderly relations of their parts are as much under geometrical control as the concentric waves spreading from a splash in a pool. If we could in any real way identify or analyse the causation of growth, biology would become a branch of physics." 1

William Bateson (1861-1926) established the modern science of genetics by reviving the theories of Gregor Mandel (1822-1884), after whom William named his son, Gregory. Mandel had observed generational mutation through breeding peas and identified recessive and dominant traits is successive generations. Mendel's published work (1866) does not give a name to these generational traits, which were christened 'genetics' by William Bateson. Mendel and W.B. opposed Darwin’s emphasis on natural selection (when given undue emphasis to the survival of the fittest), positing instead specific diversity – whereby mutation within the cell structure of an organism influenced the development of subsequent generations. The Bateson-Mandel emphasis allowed for genetic change within a biological system to be transmitted on the level of information, as opposed to the conversion of energy within a closed entropic system. The distinct difference deserves note: dynamic equilibrium requires an exchange of energy whereas homeostasis requires an exchange of information. 3 From the start of his career Gregory Bateson carried his father’s approach into the heart of his own work, allowing the accommodation of key ideas in relation to pattern and repetition which derived from his father’s work on genetics.4

In later life Gregory Bateson would make the relation of evolutionary adaptation and information explicit: “My father coined that word [“genetics”] in 1908 – it was still necessary to call the elements of Mendelian heredity ‘factors.’ Nobody could then see or would risk the notion that these must be ideas or chunks of information or command.” 5 In Gregory Bateson’s early work as a biologist he had researched the emergent symmetry of pigeons and fish “Even then, I think that the fact of communication and the fact of regularity, symmetry, etc., in anatomy, were going hand in hand.” but it was only twenty years later, when he started his cybernetic research that Bateson was able to recognise the homology between different systems, and that the “regularity in the anatomy of flowering plants was comparable to the regularity which linguists found in language.” Bateson, when referring to his father’s work, often outlines ways in which the elder Bateson anticipated homeostasis and negentropy and intuited evolution and mind as different levels of abstraction within a larger evolutionary system.

William Bateson by Arnold Forster

In Problems of Genetics (1913) William Bateson argues that specific diversity (genetic mutation) allows for variation within a given species. This position is contra to the orthodox reading of Charles Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection. In the opening chapter William Bateson outlines the traditional resistance against the theory of evolution in general and the opposition to specific diversity in particularly (on the part of supporters of Darwin). For William Bateson , specific variation is evident in the fossil records of organisms from vertebrates to bacteria: “In all these groups there are many species quite definite and unmistakable, and others practically indefinite.”9 It is evident that the evolutionary line is not as simple to read as might be first supposed. As evidence continued to amass after Darwin posited the theory of natural selection, and as this data was analysed and studied, it became increasingly apparent (to William Bateson at least) that variation is neither “evenly distributed” within nature or “arbitrary” and that variation occurs for a number of reasons, which all relate to specific variation.

When this variability is broken down it can be attributed to a number of factors: In part a result of hybridisation; in part a consequence of the persistence of hybrids by parthenogenetic reproduction – in which reproduction occurs without fertilisation (this is common in bees, ants, plants and reptiles); it might be in part due to polymorphism – in which case alternative phenotypes are produced within the same group; or variability may be due to the continued presence of individuals representing various combinations of Mendelian allelomorphs – which indicate alternative forms of the same genes (a gene is understood as a unit of heredity 10

It is also the case, at odds with the orthodoxy of natural selection, that species “gradually derived from a common progenitor”11 continue to thrive in the same environment, they do not render each other extinct, in which case it is a question of difference rather than fitness. Furthermore, a variation is sometimes so common that it loses all definition; take British Noctuid Moths, “Many are so variable that, in the common phrase, ‘scarcely two can be found alike’ ’’.12 Variation, therefore, takes place in a multiplicity of local forms for a number of different reasons.

But, having said that, an alligator cannot give birth to a photocopier.

If the differences are multifarious, what keeps differences from being totally arbitrary? What accounts for the fixity within some species and great variety in others? To beg the same question in cybernetic terms, what restraints and thresholds are in place? 13

In order to address that question W.B., like Butler had done a generation before him, must come up against the problematic of a concept which did not yet exist: negentropy. The very fecundity of the natural world and the very complexity of variation within it argued against the entropic model of heat death, whereby heterogeneity within a system decreases, and also argued against the entropic logic of “the survival of the fittest”14. William Bateson, in Problems of Genetics, allows that natural selection and specific diversity both play their part, but the challenge to the orthodoxy of natural selection, which in the time of William Bateson was meeting increasing number of anomalies, was genetic code’s flexibility, which allowed for both fixity and variation (In the age of cybernetics this range from fixity to diversity could be explained via W. Ross Ashby’s law of requisite variety and demonstrated by the machine he built, the Homeostat, see Homeostat) William Bateson held that “the phenomena of variation and stability must be an index of the internal constitution of organisms, and not mere consequences of their relations to the outer world.” The notion of an index which informs structure is a good deal more precise than Samual Butler, who searched similar territory by supposing that every organism contains: “a little unwritten history of the universe from its own point of view” but W.B, to use stochastic in its etymological sense, was still unable to hit his target in the centre.16

[William Bateson] “As soon as it is realised how largely the phenomena of variation and stability must be an index of the internal constitution of organisms, and not mere consequences of their relations to the outer world, such phenomena acquire a new and more profound significance.”

The notion that the transforms which occur in evolution are executed through the transmission of code gained support over time.

By 1943 Edwin Schrödinger‘s What is life lectures suggested that chromosomes contain the coded script of living organisms, a decade before being given empirical credence by Watson and Crick. Bertalanffy’s general systems theory, McCulluch-Pitts Neural net theory, Shannon’s information theory and Wiener’s theory of negentropy would be amongst the many elements that supported the notion that informational-biological systems described by William Bateson had a structural relation to other systems.