Cycles

Everybody knows about the familiar large-scale cycles of nature: day follows night follows day summer-fall-winter-spring-summer-fall-winter-spring, the water cycle of evaporation and precipitation that refills our lakes, scours our rivers and restores the water supply of every living thing on the planet. But not everybody appreciates how cycles — every spatial and temporal scale from the atomic to the astronomic — are quite literally the hidden spinning motors that power all the wonderful phenomena of nature.

Nikolaus Otto built and sold the first internal combustion gasoline engine in 1861, and Rudolf Diesel built his engine in 1897, two brilliant inventions that changed the world. Each exploits a cycle, the four-stroke Otto cycle or the two-stroke Diesel cycle, that accomplishes some work and then restores the system to the original position so that it is ready to accomplish some more work. The details of these cycles are ingenious, and they have been discovered and optimized by an R & D cycle of invention that is several centuries old. An even more elegant, micro-miniaturized engine is the Krebs cycle, discovered in 1937 by Hans Krebs, but invented over millions of years of evolution at the dawn of life. It is the eight-stroke chemical reaction that turns fuel — into energy in the process of metabolism that is essential to all life, from bacteria to redwood trees.

Biochemical cycles like the Krebs cycle are responsible for all the motion, growth, self-repair, and reproduction in the living world, wheels within wheels within wheels, a clockwork with trillions of moving parts, and each clock has to be rewound, restored to step one so that it can do its duty again. All of these have been optimized by the grand Darwinian cycle of reproduction, generation after generation, picking up fortuitous improvements over the eons.

At a completely different scale, our ancestors discovered the efficacy of cycles in one of the great advances of human prehistory: the role of repetition in manufacture. Take a stick and rub it with a stone and almost nothing happens — few scratches are the only visible sign of change. Rub it a hundred times and there is still nothing much to see. But rub it just so, for a few thousand times, and you can turn it into an uncannily straight arrow shaft. By the accumulation of imperceptible increments, the cyclical process creates something altogether new. The foresight and self-control required for such projects was itself a novelty, a vast improvement over the repetitive but largely instinctual and mindless building and shaping processes of other animals. And that novelty was, of course, itself a product of the Darwinian cycle, enhanced eventually by the swifter cycle of cultural evolution, in which the reproduction of the technique wasn't passed on to offspring through the genes but transmitted among non-kin conspecifics who picked up the trick of imitation.

The first ancestor who polished a stone into a handsomely symmetrical hand axe must have looked pretty stupid in the process. There he sat, rubbing away for hours on end, to no apparent effect. But hidden in the interstices of all the mindless repetition was a process of gradual refinement that was well nigh invisible to the naked eye designed by evolution to detect changes occurring at a much faster tempo. The same appearance of futility has occasionally misled sophisticated biologists. In his elegant book, Wetware, the molecular and cell biologist Dennis Bray describes cycles in the nervous system:

In a typical signaling pathway, proteins are continually being modified and demodified. Kinases and phosphates work ceaselessly like ants in a nest, adding phosphate groups to proteins and removing them again. It seems a pointless exercise, especially when you consider that each cycle of addition and removal costs the cell one molecule of — one unit of precious energy. Indeed, cyclic reactions of this kind were initially labeled "futile." But the adjective is misleading. The addition of phosphate groups to proteins is the single most common reaction in cells and underpins a large proportion of the computations they perform. Far from being futile, this cyclic reaction provides the cell with an essential resource: a flexible and rapidly tunable device.

The word "computations" is aptly chosen, for it turns out that all the "magic" of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, re-entrant, reflexive information-transformation processes from the biochemical scale within the neuron to the whole brain sleep cycle, waves of cerebral activity and recovery revealed by EEGs. Computer programmers have been exploring the space of possible computations for less than a century, but their harvest of invention and discovery so far includes millions of loops within loops within loops. The secret ingredient of improvement is always the same: practice, practice, practice.

It is useful to remember that Darwinian evolution is just one kind of accumulative, refining cycle. There are plenty of others. The problem of the origin of life can be made to look insoluble ("irreducibly complex") if one argues, as Intelligent Design advocates have done, that "since evolution by natural selection depends on reproduction," there cannot be a Darwinian solution to the problem of how the first living, reproducing thing came to exist. It was surely breathtakingly complicated, beautifully designed — must have been a miracle.

If we lapse into thinking of the pre-biotic, pre-reproductive world as a sort of featureless chaos of chemicals (like the scattered parts of the notorious jetliner assembled by a windstorm), the problem does look daunting and worse, but if we remind ourselves that the key process in evolution is cyclical repetition (of which genetic replication is just one highly refined and optimized instance), we can begin to see our way to turning the mystery into a puzzle: How did all those seasonal cycles, water cycles, geological cycles, and chemical cycles, spinning for millions of years, gradually accumulate the preconditions for giving birth to the biological cycles? Probably the first thousand "tries" were futile, near misses. But as Cole Porter says in his most sensual song, see what happens if you "do it again, and again, and again."

A good rule of thumb, then, when confronting the apparent magic of the world of life and mind is: look for the cycles that are doing all the hard work.