Susantha Goonatilake’s Three Information Flow Lineages

Discussion

Marcia Bates:

"Goonatilake (1991) has identified and defined what he calls information flow lineages through the history of living matter on the planet. He argues that there have been, and continue to be, three lines of information transmission in association with life, which he calls the genetic, the neural-cultural, and the exosomatic "flow lines" of information transmission (Goonatilake, 1991, summary on pp. 118-120). Genetic information is transmitted through the usual processes of biological inheritance, influenced by natural selection.

He states:

- Beginning from prebiotic origins a continuous lineage of information and of organized complexity exists as a genetic flow system. As evolution proceeds through time, these lines of genetic information spread out and radiate into new environmental niches (p. 118).

Further:

- Metaphorically one could say that the flow line has a ‘conversation’ with the environment, successful conversations becoming congealed in the genome (p. 125).

Thus, the characteristics of organisms that promote their fitness, that is, that enable organisms to survive and reproduce in a given environment, are propagated through time in their genetic makeup.

Goonatilake describes the neural element in the following way:

- To adapt to the changing everyday environment feedback loops exist between the neural system and the environment, influencing the behaviour of both (p. 119).

- In the phenotype which is created out of genotypal information, there are other information-producing ‘devices’ in the form of hormonal and neural circuits … These extra-genetic devices provide also the means by which cultural information is transmitted from generation to generation (p. 15).

He is careful to distinguish between neural systems, which "can exist without transmissions of acquired information from parent to offspring" (p. 119), and cultural systems in which "such transmissions across generations, however, do occur " (p. 119). He treats the combined "neural-cultural" as the second flow line. Thus information can be transferred between the animal and the environment, and from one animal to another through observation or communication in real time. He traces the history of encephalization, or growth of brain size relative to body size in mammals, and points out that some ecological niches demand more and some less brain development (p. 19).

Goonatilake further argues that a third flow line, the "exosomatic" has also developed. This exosomatic line consists of information stored outside the animal as the "externalization of memories" (p. 83). He uses as examples the pheromone trails laid down by ants to guide other ants to food, and even the beaten trails to a water hole that animals follow in a forest (p. 84). (There is some resemblance here to Dawkins’ discussion of "the extended phenotype," 1982, not cited by Goonatilake.) The amount and complexity of exosomatic information has grown tremendously over the last several thousand years and has become extremely important for humans. As he points out, books were initially "a repository of men’s memories" and later they became memory stores on which brains work (p. 122). Thus, in the third flow line, information can be transferred from one person to another, without the two people ever being in each other’s presence, and thus can skip generations.

He relates the three flow lines, and suggests, metaphorically, why they developed:

- The rudimentary beginnings of these exosomatic information lines can be traced back to even the earliest animals. But they developed and expanded only with the primates and most elaborately only in association with humans. It is only when the adaptive limits of the neural-cultural information line begin to be reached that it, in at least some functions ‘spills over’ into the non-biological; in a similar way, the neural-cultural line developed after ‘spilling over’ from the genetic (p. 83).

In other words, neural-cultural transmission is dependent on and arises out of genetic transmission, and exosomatic transmission develops out of the neural-cultural. As human beings used their sophisticated brains to develop dense, informationally rich cultures and learning that they wanted to retain and re-use, they first passed down stories and learning in person (neural-cultural flow line), then discovered and developed means of creating sophisticated external memory stores (exosomatic flow line), with which they could store and pass on vastly greater amounts of information.

Earlier, Brookes (1975) had also used the term "exosomatic" in the same sense to refer to external information stores. White developed the concept extensively also, calling it "external memory" (1992), and Brunk (2001) called a similar concept "exoinformation." At the genetic and neural-cultural levels, respectively, Dawkins distinguished genes and "memes" (1976), and Swanson (1983) defined "biogenes" and "sociogenes." However, I have found no one but Goonatilake who has incorporated these three paths of information transmission into a single model."

(https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/NatRep_info_11m_050514.html)