Written on 28 August 2016.

  

As you may recall, the Bradley Effect got its name from Tom Bradley, the former mayor of Los Angeles. In his 1982 California gubernatorial race, he consistently led Republican George Deukmejian. As former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder explained four years ago:

  

 

On the eve of the election, polls anointed him a prohibitive favorite. But on Election Day, Bradley lost to his white opponent, Republican George Deukmejian." 

Post-election analysis showed that white voters had cast ballots for Bradley in far smaller numbers than polling suggested. Meanwhile, the votes of the avowed "undecideds" fell in a cascading wave for Deukmejian. 

This almost happened to me. Voter surveys immediately before my 1989 election as Virginia governor showed me leading my Republican opponent by almost 10 points. Some showed an even larger lead.

   Like David Dinkins in New York City, Wilder only eked out a victory by one-half of a percentage point. But unlike Bradley, Wilder was prepared. "My campaign knew better, however," he pointed out in 2012. "Our internal polls always showed the race to be a statistical dead heat."

   Four years later, Donald Trump and his water carriers are hoping for a repeat of the Bradley experience, but in reverse.

Just one day before Trump's campaign manager Conway unveiled her magic unicorn theory of The Donald's path to victory, campaign CEO Stephen Bannon's friends at Breitbart ran this headline: "EXCLUSIVE: Former Tom Bradley Aide Says Secret Trump Voters Similar to 'Bradley Effect.'"

Emerson College Professor Gregory Payne tells Breitbart News that after witnessing the actual Bradley Effect while working on that campaign, he sees the same phenomenon in the 2016 with voters reluctant to tell pollsters they support GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

   Trump backers began getting their hopes up last year. First, In May 2015 the Pew Research Center published the results of a survey examining "From Telephone to the Web: The Challenge of Mode of Interview Effects in Public Opinion Polls." The study found "that differences in responses by survey mode are fairly common, but typically not large, with a mean difference of 5.5 percentage points and a median difference of five points across the 60 questions." Those deltas were larger on the phone regarding "societal discrimination against several different groups" and online when respondents were asked to "give various political figures a 'very unfavorable' rating." As Pew explained:

The social interaction inherent in a telephone or in-person interview may also exert subtle pressures on respondents that affect how they answer questions. Respondents may feel a need to present themselves in a more positive light to an interviewer, leading to an overstatement of socially desirable behaviors and attitudes and an understatement of opinions and behaviors they fear would elicit disapproval from another person. Previous research has shown that respondents understate such activities as drug and alcohol use and overstate activities like donating to charity or helping other people. This phenomenon is often referred to as "social desirability bias." These effects may be stronger among certain types of people than others, introducing additional bias into the results.

   Then in December, Morning Consult did its own research with 2,400 Republicans (one-third interviewed, one-third completed an online survey, and one-third taking an automated phone survey) and concluded "Donald Trump Performs Better in Online Polling." As they summed it up, "Republicans are more likely to say they want Donald Trump in the White House if they are taking a poll online versus in a live telephone interview. And, if you're a highly-educated or engaged Republican voter, it turns out that you're far less likely to tell another human being you want Trump as president." Trump earned the support of 38 percent of online respondents, compared to 36 percent completing the automated phone survey and 32 percent personally interviewed by phone. But The Donald performed much worse with a live interviewer if the respondent had some college education:

Among adults with a bachelor's degree or postgraduate degree, Trump performs about 10 percentage points better online than via live telephone. And, among adults with some college, Trump performs more than 10 percentage points better online. Conversely, Republicans with a high school education or less favored Trump on the phone over online...

What explains Trump's worse numbers on the phone? One possible explanation is "social desirability bias," or in other words, people being reluctant to select Trump when talking to another person because they do not believe it will be viewed as a socially acceptable decision.

   That's the very script Kellyanne Conway was offering reporters this week. Republican California Rep. Duncan Hunter was probably thinking along the same lines when he proclaimed in February that "I think you have more Trump supporters in Congress. They just have to come out of the closet, so to speak." And in June, Donald Trump himself proclaimed that when it comes to the Bradley Effect, orange is the new black:

"When I poll, I do fine, but when I run I do much better. In other words, people say I'm not going to say who I'm voting for, don't be embarrassed, I'm not going to say who I'm voting for and then they get it and I do much better, it's like an amazing effect."

   Unfortunately for Donald Trump and company, there are a lot of problems with their reverse Bradley Effect dream. As we'll see below, primary contests and general elections are not the same. Recent history provides another red flag, as fans of John McCain and Mitt Romney learned to their great disappointment.

   Oh, and one other thing: By most accounts, the Bradley Effect no longer exists.

Dailykos

 

Written on 23 August 2016.

   There are all kinds of names used to describe the northern city of Kirkuk and its surrounds. The Heart of Iraq. The Kurdish Jerusalem. A Mini-Iraq. Most of these refer either to the fact that Kirkuk hosts such a mixed population, one that includes Arabs, Turkmen and Kurdish populations, or to the fact that it is also one of the country’s disputed territories; that is, the Kurdish say it belongs to their semi-autonomous region while the Iraqi Arabs say it belongs to Iraq proper.

   But recently a new name has been thrown around: Kirkuk - The Independent Region.

   As the extremist group known as the Islamic State is being pushed back in Iraq and the future looks more secure in the north, local politicians have once again started to debate Kirkuk’s future.

   There appear to be three main options. Firstly, no change, which would mean Kirkuk remains part of federal Iraq. Secondly, annexation to the neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan – that is, the area becomes part of the semi-autonomous region controlled by the Iraqi Kurdish. And thirdly, Kirkuk strikes out on its own, and gains recognition as another semi-autonomous region, except in its own name.

   Ever since the security crisis sparked by the Islamic State, or IS, group began, Kirkuk looked to be moving toward the second option. The Iraqi Kurdish military had moved into the city and surrounds to secure them and prevent incursions by the IS group. To all intents and purposes, Kirkuk was under the control of Iraqi Kurdistan.  

   Politically this process had been underway since before the security crisis. In April 2014, Iraqi Kurdish politicians took the majority of seats in the 12-seat cabinet of the provincial council and Kirkuk’s governor is also Kurdish.

   Any of Iraq’s provinces can become a region if they follow the steps outlined in the Iraqi Constitution, which involve agreements between provincial council members as well as among voters.

   Interestingly enough, the Kurdish governor of the province, Najmuddin Karim, likes the idea of an independent Kirkuk. His enthusiasm is shared by some of the other Kurdish politicians and a number of the Turkmen.

   “Kirkuk should be separated from Baghdad so that we can see more economic developments and better security,” Karim told NIQASH. “If Kirkuk remains with Baghdad our future is unclear.”

   In terms of a timeline, Karim, who is a member of one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s leading political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, says that Kirkuk should be independent first. After this, the local people can decide what should happen or possibly Iraqi Kurdistan’s political leadership will decide it belongs to them.

   Karim’s opinion is actually the opposite of what most of his colleagues in the PUK want, as well as what most of the members of Iraqi Kurdistan’s other major party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, want. They oppose the idea of an independent Kirkuk region.

   “The Iraqi Kurdish military and security forces are in charge of security in Kirkuk, and its oil is also exported through Iraqi Kurdistan,” argues Adnan Kirkuki, a senior member of, and spokesperson for, the KDP. “The future of the city is clear. It should be returned back to the Iraqi Kurdish region. Iraqi Kurdistan is getting ready to hold a referendum on Kurdish independence,” Kirkuki continues, referring to KDP leader, Massoud Barzani’s ongoing calls for independence from Iraq. “Kirkuk should be part of this.”

   Turkmen politicians have slightly different ideas about Kirkuk’s independence. The Turkmen Front, which represents all the Turkmen parties in Kirkuk, has nine seats on the 41-seat provincial council. The Turkmen Front likes the idea of a Kirkuk region but it wants this to be permanent, with no possibility of Kirkuk later becoming part of Iraqi Kurdistan.

   “Kirkuk should be transformed into an independent region,” agrees Ali Mahdi, the spokesperson for the Turkmen Front. “An independent Kirkuk could have a cabinet, president and parliament similar to that which Iraqi Kurdistan has now. But the senior positions in the new administration must be shared out equally between the Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen until there is peaceful coexistence in Kirkuk.”

   Meanwhile the Arab politicians in Kirkuk’s provincial government don’t like the idea of an independent Kirkuk at all.

   “The history of Kirkuk is indelibly linked to the Iraqi state. Any kind of independence would be a red line,” says Mohammed Khader, an Arab politician in the provincial government. “Kirkuk is a miniature version of Iraq and this microcosm, where all the Iraqi ethnicities live together, should not be vandalized. Anyone who tries to harm this miniature is committing political suicide,” he insists.

   “The IS group is slowly being pushed out of Kirkuk’s surrounds but the Iraqi government is not fulfilling its obligations here either,” says Omar Zankana, a lecturer in political science at the University of Kirkuk. “That is why the different political parties here are trying to make decisions about the future of the province.”

   However, he argues, none of the groups can make the decision alone – they don’t have the numbers. “Two of the groups should make a decision together and if they are united it will be easier for them to hold a referendum on the future of the city and province,” he concludes.

Shalaw Mohammed -- NIQASH

Written on 26 August 2016.

   The growing phenomenon of Afghan refugees joining Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to support the Syrian Assad regime has sparked increasing attention. In January, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that thousands of Afghan refugees in Iran – many of them minors – have been coerced into fighting in Syria, and several of them threatened with deportation if they refused.

   The Iranian authorities told the refugees that if they defected, their families would be detained. According to HRW and Al Jazeera, Iranian officials have also recruited Afghan refugee detainees, offering to reduce or remove their prison sentences in return for army service. These Afghans are promised up to $1,000 in monthly salary and legal residence upon return to Iran. However, few of the fighters that HRW interviewed had received these benefits.

   In contrast to these accounts, Iranian news sources and social media campaigns that highlight and herald Afghans’ contribution to Assad’s battle suggest a more complex process. From the different narratives, a recruitment story emerges that intersects labor exploitation and a search for survival with sentiments of transnational, sect-based solidarity. In this brief intervention, I initiate a conversation that calls for further research into the overlapping terrains of migrant labor, military intervention and ‘foreign fighters’, as demonstrated in the migratory routes of the Afghan refugee recruits in Syria.  

Call to Arms

    For decades, Afghans have sought refuge in Iran from warfare and military invasions. The majority of Afghan refugees in Iran are Hazara, a Shiite minority in Afghanistan who have been, and continue to be, persecuted and discriminated against by the Taliban in Afghanistan. With the escalation of drug trafficking between the two countries in recent years, and subsequent record-high heroin consumption among Iranian youth – a development Iran in large part blames Afghanistan’s opium production for – bilateral relations have become more strained.

   Afghans fleeing across the border to Iran have been the first to pay the price, as Iran has heavily restricted its asylum processing system, charging Afghans high fees for visas and deporting an increasing number of Afghan refugees every year. As a repercussion of this policy, Afghans are heavily targeted by Iranian authorities for drug smuggling, and thousands of Afghan minors are imprisoned with drug charges. Of the three million Afghan refugees living in Iran, only 950,000 carry legal refugee status. The uncertainty of living without papers, access to legal employment and education, often for decades, makes Afghans in Iran easy targets for exploitation. But, as I suggest in the following, the coercive practices of the Iranian government masks more than it reveals.

   Until the recent uptick in Iranian losses in Syria, the Iranian Foreign Ministry maintained that the army only deploys “advisors” to Syria anddenied enlisting Afghan soldiers in their intervention, referring to them instead as “volunteers” who carry no official affiliation with the army (cf. BBC, Washington Institute, The New Yorker). Meanwhile, Iranian commanders have commented more openly on the volunteer narrative, publicly branding Afghan recruitment as part of a transnational Shiite front, and commanders often attend the funerals of Afghan fighters in Iran (cf. video, The Guardian; BBC).

   A commander from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced in a speech this winter that Iran had formed a regional force called the Fatemiyoun Brigade, a primarily Afghan unit, to fight in Syria. Another commander told Al Jazeera in January that as many as 20,000 Afghans have been recruited to fight with the Iranian Quds in Syria. The precarious nature of these estimates aside, they indicate that Afghan recruitment in Iran is a growing and increasingly common phenomenon. An Iranian reporter from The Guardian who visited Mashhad in November last year, a city in Iran which hosts a large Afghan population, depicted long lines of Afghans waiting outside the local military center to enroll in the Fatemiyoun Brigade. Whether legal, financial or ideological motivations drive them to enroll, their active involvement in the recruitment calls for attention.

   The testimonies from Afghan fighters and Iranian military personnel demonstrate the extent to which the sectarian/ideological dimension is embedded within Iran’s recruitment strategy.  According to the HRW report, the Iranian authorities separate Afghan men of Shiite descent out for recruitment. The Sayida Zainab shrine, an important Shiite pilgrimage site south of Damascus, plays a prominent role in both Iranian and Afghan narratives of their call to arms in Syria. Iran refers to those killed in Syria as “defenders of the holy shrine”, stressing the urgency of protecting Shia heritage and communities in the region.

   In an Iranian state-produced documentary, an Afghan commander with the Iranian Quds explains how “the Shia of Afghanistan have felt responsible and rushed to Syria to defend our religion and the Shrine of Zainab.” A handful of the Afghan interviewees in the cited HRW report said they had volunteered to defend Shiite religious sites and communities in Syria. In footage shared online by the Free Syrian Army, captured Afghan soldiers list socioeconomic, legal and sectarian motivations for fighting with the Iranian army. A young Afghan fighter in the video describes his narrative of recruitment: “I was imprisoned on drug charges with a sentence of six years … they told us the shrine of Zainab will be destroyed… I came from Iran to join the war with the promise of a monthly salary of $600.” Suggesting some agency in his passage from Iran to Syria, the soldier’s narrative allows for a more complex understanding of the Afghans’ recruitment process.

 Expendable Lives 

   Sectarian affiliation in this case does not supersede a social hierarchy based on national identity. Indeed, the body count of Afghan soldiers in Syria suggests a less glorious reality of the united Shiite struggle. According to a Spiegel report, some 700 Afghans have lost their lives in Daraa and Aleppo alone while fighting for Assad. Recently, senior fellow Ali Alfoneh from the Washington Institute attempted to decipher the number of Afghan and Iranian casualties in Syria using data from funeral services in Iran. He found that at least 255 Afghans and 342 Iranian nationals were killed in combat in Syria between 2012 and March 2016, with a considerable spike this year. Even as recent death tolls indicate that Iranian nationals are increasingly involved in combat too, Afghans still made up half of Iran’s official losses in recent months. As Alfoneh argues, “the Islamic Republic will limit its own exposure and losses by fighting to its last non-Iranian proxy, even when its own personnel would be more effective”.

   The notion that the young Afghan recruits represent expendable “bare” life, placed at the front line of the battle, is present throughout personal accounts. An Afghan teenage recruit who had fled his military troops in Syria and arrived to Lesbos, Greece, told a BBC reporter that Afghan fighters in Syria were used as “first-wave shock troops” and were “effectively disposable”. A Syrian officer in charge of an Afghan brigade wasquoted in Spiegel as saying: “Do what you want with them. You can kill them, they’re just mercenaries. We can send you thousands of them.” According to the same report, the Syrian regime often engages in prisoner exchanges over Iranian and Hizbollah soldiers, but Afghans and other mercenaries of the Fatemiyoun Brigade are never part of the deal.

   In the same article, an Afghan ex-fighter for the Fatemiyoun said, “When we spoke Persian to each other, they [the Syrian regime soldiers] yelled at us”. As this account suggests, the Afghans’ sense of solidarity does not necessarily translate to their Syrian regime clients on the ground. As anthropologist Darryl Li has written, national anxiety towards foreign fighters reflects a logic that renders the presence of ‘foreigners’ in ‘other people’s wars’ conspicuous, if not illegitimate. Foreign fighters lack the national license to kill, as sanctioned by international law. As a consequence, they are treated as ‘war machines’, reduced to a function by their lack of recognition in the national order.

   The irony is that mercenaries are primarily deployed in interventionist warfare, where national claims to ownership have been erased by a transnational cacophony of arms.

Expedient Labor

   Mercenaries do not only symbolize expendable life; their low-cost labor is also expedient for armies involved in large-scale missions abroad. A Syrian rebel commander who had been in combat against Afghan soldiers in Syria described his Afghan antagonists: “They are incredibly tenacious, run faster than we do and keep shooting even after they have been surrounded. But as soon as they lose radio contact with headquarters, they panic.” This discourse resembles that deployed by the French colonial authorities, who viewed their Senegalese mercenary troops as physically strong but mentally weak. The colonial troops were, similar to the Afghans in Syria, placed lowest in the military hierarchy, separated from the national soldiers and used as pawns on the battlefront.

   And yet, similar to Iran, the French authorities were successful in presenting colonial military service as an entryway into France proper. The French colonial armies recruited Senegalese men to fight with the promise of a stable salary and, for the lucky few, residence in the colonial motherland. As historian Myron Echenberg has documented, French colonial military service implied a double disciplining act for the Senegalese. Not only was the body trained to follow military instructions; their mind was also trained to serve and honor the colonial project. In its joint promise of political membership and recognition, army conscription proved a highly successful method of ensuring loyalty among the colonial population.

   For refugees trapped in a hostile global migrant labor economy amid closing frontiers, the situation has changed little since the colonial days. In Iran, Afghans are discriminated against not only because of their lack of a place in the national imaginary, but also because they have become symbols of cheap and exploitable labor. The exploitation of migrant labor in contemporary warfare is hardly an authentic Iranian phenomenon. The Bahraini and Libyan regimes used African and South-Asian migrant troops to quell the uprisings in 2011 (Li 2011), and Saudi Arabia and the UAE have contracted hundreds of Latin American and West African private armies to fight the Houthis in Yemen (NYT; Al Monitor). Li has documented how the US forces heavily rely on subcontracted migrants for service and support on the frontlines (cf. also Aikins 2016; Stillman 2013).

Posters commemorating Iranian soldiers as martyrs on Shariati Street in North Tehran. (Photo Credit: Alex Shams)

   The benefits for states using subcontracted shadow troops and service personnel are clear; they are cheap in labor and do not figure into official estimates of military losses. Mercenaries also allow a state impunity, since national troops are not held accountable for the actions of private armies. Mercenaries thereby occupy a diffused legal zone where they are neither persecuted nor protected by the law. Yet, contrary to US’ subcontracted mercenaries, who are not officially registered or honored as part of the national armies on whose part they fight, the Afghan Fatemiyoun fighters do not operate simply as shadow troops. Funeral ceremonies and social media accounts for Afghan troops suggest that Afghans killed in Syria are openly celebrated as martyrs in Iran. Video footage shared on Facebook show Afghans from the Fatemiyoun Brigade commemorating fellow fighters killed in Syria and parading their coffins in cities in Iran, often in company with Iranian commanders.

   In this way, the presence of Afghans as mercenary troops in Assad’s counterinsurgency complicates and challenges present understandings of the foreign fighter, often affiliated with the catch-all figure of the jihadi. The mercenary and the foreign jihadi are often placed in juxtaposition, which implies that the two are necessarily opposites – one is associated with socio-economic desperation, the other is understood as an ideologically and politically driven fighter.

   Yet a growing body of literature on foreign fighters (cf. The Soufan Group 2014; Small Arms Survey 2015; The Atlantic 2015; The New Yorker2016) indicates that, just as the use of sectarian and ideological solidarity plays a role in Afghan recruitment, the North African and Arab millennials who in the post-mortem phase of the 2011 uprisings travelled in large numbers to join Sunni insurgencies in Syria and Iraq are often trapped in similar spirals of poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity that Afghan refugees face in Iran. A young, unemployed Tunisian male seeking labor and a sense of purpose by joining ISIS or al-Nusra in Syria may have more in common with a young Afghan Shiite male refugee who joins Iran’s mission in Syria than their separate categories allow for.

Repertoires of Fighting

   While migrant mercenaries may represent expendable life to their employers, they often share histories of colonial transaction and violence with the people they fight alongside, or against. For many Afghans, the Syrian conflict is all too familiar. According to researcher Ahmad Shuja, quoted by the Washington Institute, some 2,000 Afghan Shiites of mainly Hazara origin fled from Afghanistan to Syria before hostilities there broke out. Afghan migrant labor is also key to Iran’s heavy investment in Syria in more than one way. Wealthy Iranians are reportedly buying land and real estate in regime-held areas of Syria, and, according to Iranian analyst Fariborz Saremi, Iranian contractors bring in Afghan migrant laborers to build houses for them. Iranians are opening business and investing in government aid programs in Syria, preparing for a long-term if not permanent presence there, enabled by the flexible labor of Afghans and other migrants.

   Afghans’ own history of material, religious and intellectual cross-border transaction demonstrates how migrant mercenaries are often positioned as simultaneously external to and deeply embedded within the battles they fight. As Engseng Ho has documented, the economic and religious ties formed by centuries of transaction across the Indian Ocean shaped links of solidarity between religious groups in Afghanistan, Yemen and East Africa that became instrumentalized in the encounter with 21st century Western imperialism. Imperial battles over Afghan territory produced its own set of transregional foreign fighters who fought on Taliban’s side against shifting regimes of invasion.

   Afghans have in turn travelled across borders to pay their support in various regional struggles. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, an independent Afghan Shia force – the Abouzar Brigade – supported Iran’s fight against Saddam Hussein. These transnational lines of solidarity against different instances of colonial and imperial intervention complicate the easy reading of Afghans’ contribution to Iran’s regional ambitions as merely reactionary or subversive.

A woman mourning her husband at the Martyrs’ Cemetery of Imamzadeh Ali Akbar in Chizar, a neighborhood near Farmaniyeh in north Tehran. The posters commemorate “defenders of the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab” and the fallen are buried among martyrs from the Iran-Iraq War. (Photo Credit: Alex Shams)

 The relationship between the Afghan mercenary, the Iranian army and the Syrian regime ‘client’ rehearses patterns of national aspiration and loyalty witnessed in previous constellations of colonial military servitude. At the same time, Afghans’ sense of sectarian belonging with their fellow fighters, not to mention their achieved status as martyrs in Iran, sets them apart from subcontracted mercenaries who operate in the shadows. By stressing this point, I do not wish to challenge Afghans’ accounts of exploitation. As conflict refugees denied legal and political recognition, and as migrant workers competing on a market that capitalizes on that exclusion, Afghans are doubly exploited. Yet their socio-economic dispossession does not lessen their potential belief in the cause of fighting.

   The Syrian conflict, with its flux of internationalized armies, calls for research that reconsiders existing repertoires of soldiers and fighters. The myriad cross-border transactions of arms, bodies and ideas fuelling Syria’s war encourages research that looks closer at the role of the foreigner, not as an exceptional or new phenomenon, but as a staple in colonial, imperial and ongoing warfare.

   Rather than asking, why is the foreigner fighting, this type of research could begin by asking: What defines the foreigner in warfare? In a war where every local army receives supplies and manpower from abroad, is the foreigner still a relevant category? Is every fighter not simultaneously foreign and familiar to the battle he is placed in?

Anna Reumert  --  Ajam Media Collective

Update

Iranian diplomat arrested in Afghanistan for recruiting Shiite fighters for Syrian civil war. Special cemetaries in Afghanistan for dead

mercenaries. 

Iranian Afghanistan: Iranischer Diplomat wegen Rekrutierung von Schiiten-Kämpfern festgenommen

Written on 23 August 2016.

Why evolution may be smarter than we thought  

   Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution offers an explanation for why biological organisms seem so well designed to live on our planet. This process is typically described as “unintelligent” – based on random variations with no direction. But despite its success, some oppose this theory because they don’t believe living things can evolve in increments. Something as complex as the eye of an animal, they argue, must be the product of an intelligent creator.

   I don’t think invoking a supernatural creator can ever be a scientifically useful explanation. But what about intelligence that isn’t supernatural? Our new results, based on computer modelling, link evolutionary processes to the principles of learning and intelligent problem solving – without involving any higher powers. This suggests that, although evolution may have started off blind, with a couple of billion years of experience it has got smarter.

What is intelligence?

   Intelligence can be many things, but sometimes it’s nothing more than looking at a problem from the right angle. Finding an intelligent solution can be just about recognising that something you assumed to be a constant might be variable (like the orientation of the paper in the image below). It can also be about approaching a problem with the right building blocks.

   With good building blocks (for example triangles) it’s easy to find a combination of steps (folds) that solves the problem by incremental improvement (each fold covers more picture). But with bad building blocks (folds that create long thin rectangles) a complete solution is impossible.

   In humans, the ability to approach a problem with an appropriate set of building blocks comes from experience – because we learn. But until now we have believed that evolution by natural selection can’t learn; it simply plods on, banging away relentlessly with the same random-variation “hammer”, incrementally accumulating changes when they happen to be beneficial.

The evolution of evolvability

   In computer science we use algorithms, such as those modelling neural networks in the brain, to understand how learning works. Learning isn’t intrinsically mysterious; we can get machines to do it with step by step algorithms. Such machine learning algorithms are a well-understood part of artificial intelligence. In a neural network, learning involves adjusting the connections between neurons (stronger or weaker) in the direction that maximises rewards. With simple methods like this it is possible to get neural networks to not just solve problems, but to get better at solving problems over time.

   But what about evolution, can it get better at evolving over time? The idea is known as the evolution of evolvability. Evolvability, simply the ability to evolve, depends on appropriate variation, selection and heredity – Darwin’s cornerstones. Interestingly, all of these components can be altered by past evolution, meaning past evolution can change the way that future evolution operates.

   For example, random genetic variation can make a limb of an animal longer or shorter, but it can also change whether forelimbs and hindlimbs change independently or in a correlated manner. Such changes alter the building blocks available to future evolution. If past selection has shaped these building blocks well, it can make solving new problems look easy – easy enough to solve with incremental improvement. For example, if limb lengths have evolved to change independently, evolving increased height will require multiple changes (affecting each limb) and intermediate stages may be worse off. But if changes are correlated, individual changes might be beneficial.

   The idea of the evolution of evolvability has been around for some time, but the detailed application of learning theory is beginning to give this area a much needed theoretical foundation.

   Our work shows that the evolution of regulatory connections between genes, which govern how genes are expressed in our cells, has the same learning capabilities as neural networks. In other words, gene networks evolve like neural networks learn. While connections in neural networks change in the direction that maximises rewards, natural selection changes genetic connections in the direction that increases fitness. The ability to learn is not itself something that needs to be designed – it is an inevitable product of random variation and selection when acting on connections.

   The exciting implication of this is that evolution can evolve to get better at evolving in exactly the same way that a neural network can learn to be a better problem solver with experience. The intelligent bit is not explicit “thinking ahead” (or anything else un-Darwinian); it is the evolution of connections that allow it to solve new problems without looking ahead.

   So, when an evolutionary task we guessed would be difficult (such as producing the eye) turns out to be possible with incremental improvement, instead of concluding that dumb evolution was sufficient after all, we might recognise that evolution was very smart to have found building blocks that make the problem look so easy.

   Interestingly, Alfred Russel Wallace (who suggested a theory of natural selection at the same time as Darwin) later used the term “intelligent evolution” to argue for divine intervention in the trajectory of evolutionary processes. If the formal link between learning and evolution continues to expand, the same term could become used to imply the opposite.

 Richard A. Watson -- The Conversation