Читать книгу The mind of a fox - Clem Sunter - Страница 8

You needn’t have salt water coursing through your veins to imagine the following analogy: an angling hedgehog, if there ever was one, would prefer to fish within the known, protective waters of a cove where the effects of tide and winds are relatively certain and controllable. In contrast, a sea-fox would prefer to investigate other fishing grounds beyond the protective waters of the cove and be willing to operate in the uncertain and uncontrollable elements of the open sea.

Thus, an essential element in the difference between the mind-set of the fox and the hedgehog is the fox’s preparedness to strike out for the unknown. This in turn means an acceptance that mistakes do happen. What is more, mistakes are not just golden opportunities for learning; they are, in fact, sometimes the only opportunity for learning something truly new and making progress. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin accidentally when he saw that a bit of mould, which had fallen from a culture plate in his laboratory, had destroyed bacteria around it. Basically, he won the Nobel Prize, and a knighthood into the bargain, for a mistake which he had the intelligence to follow up on.

Hedgehogs balk at this approach because it may well expose them to peer ridicule. Indeed, they view mistakes in two possible lights. If it is somebody else’s, that person is to blame because somebody has to be held responsible and punished. If the mistake is their own, no-one is to blame because it was the result of circumstances beyond anyone’s control. In the latter case, hedgehogs are very good at producing an expression of injured innocence, reminding one of professional footballers about to be given a yellow or red card for a foul. Either way, mistakes are perceived by hedgehogs as aberrations which don’t advance you up the learning curve. Failure has the same penalty attached to it as drawing the “chance” or “community chest” card in a game of Monopoly that says: do not pass go, do not collect £200, move directly to jail! Better be right all the time is the maxim of the cautious hedgehog; or at least don’t be caught out if you’re wrong.

Foxes can take solace from the fact that their approach to learning and problem-solving has been used successfully for many years by the world’s most powerful and foxy CEO – Mother Nature. As pointed out by Professor Daniel C. Dennet, the Director of Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts: “For evolution, which knows nothing, the leaps into novelty are blindly taken by mutations, which are copying ‘errors’ in the DNA. Most of these are fatal errors, in fact. Since the vast majority of mutations are harmful, the process of natural selection actually works to keep the mutation rate very low. Fortunately for us, it does not achieve perfect success, for if it did, evolution would finally grind to a halt, its sources of novelty dried up.”

This is particularly evident in the enigmatic rain forests of Borneo which boast one of the largest concentrations of gliders – at least thirty different species of animals as diverse as lizards, squirrels, lemurs or colugos, snakes, geckos and frogs – that have changed their physiological structure over the years to allow them to glide from tree to tree. Why is this island so rich in gliding species while other rain forests like the Amazon have none? The answer – Mother Nature and evolution. The rain forests of South East Asia are dominated by giant dipterocarp trees which tend to crowd out other trees and, to add insult to injury, offer hungry residents infrequent and unpredictable bounties of fruit. To work within this context of inconsistent and non-controllable food sources, the frogs and other animals that lived within the area took to an ingenious way of moving from one arboreal restaurant to another – jumping large distances. A creative strategy indeed! They realised that this provided the most effective way of getting around without excessive climbing and exposure to the danger of predators. Gradually they evolved to a more manageable mode of movement – gliding. Understandably this didn’t happen overnight, nor without its fair share of bruised and battered little bodies. But it was all part of the learning experience.

The point of the gliding, flying frogs? The mind-set of making mistakes and learning from them to expand one’s knowledge, so intrinsic to the mind of the fox, is nothing new. It is a natural process, and it has been around for millions of years. The other important lesson to derive from this example is: think the unthinkable. A frog that glides? You’re pulling my leg. But it’s a fact like the flying hedgehogs in the previous section – except that the latter travel first class! Mind you, in the world of political affairs, the Florida recount in the US presidential election was also unthinkable until it happened in 2000.

How else can the advance in the forest gliders be construed to be of relevance to the global economy? How can those blessed with a higher cognitive function than a flying lizard benefit from this insight? Humans have the tendency to try and pre-empt a future to which they link adverse consequences by taking actions to head it off. To a risk-averse person there is nothing wrong with this strategy. Ironically, however, such restrictive thinking was not the type that laid the foundations for, and made possible, a global economy. The great explorers of the past, like Marco Polo, David Livingstone and Christopher Columbus were all foxes who were responsible for establishing trade routes and the exchange of ideas and cultures. The hedgehogs followed in their tracks as settlers. Much of the time these pioneering foxes didn’t know where they were going. Columbus thought he was heading for Asia, but intercepted America by chance.

Indeed, in determining their position at sea, the early navigators implemented a learn-from-mistakes philosophy. They would first make a guess about where they were. Next, they estimated – to the nearest nautical mile – their latitude and longitude. After that, they worked out how high in the sky the sun would reach at midday if, by some incredible coincidence, that was their actual position. They would then measure the actual elevation of the sun, compare the figures and adjust their initial estimate accordingly. If they were still wrong, they would indulge in a process of iteration till they obtained an answer that was approximately correct. Today, on the same principle of taking the plunge and then revising one’s position in light of further information, the global economy is being significantly reshaped by the new-age sea-foxes – the Internet pioneers. Take Amazon.com and eBay. The former, even with its ups and downs, has revolutionised retailing with its on-line marketing of books. The other set up a website which has changed the nature of auctioneering forever. Have you ever heard of cyber-fleas? Probably not, but eBay is the world’s biggest cyber-fleamarket. You can sell or buy almost anything on the site. At the heart of eBay’s success is that nobody in the world of bricks and mortar can imitate it. Its uniqueness lies in its virtuality.