362 Information Storage and Neural Control 



6,000 base pairs, the mammal close to 10'", according to Dr. Kit. 

 The simplest animals possess a few hundred or thousand neurons, 

 man about 10'". Adding more of the same does, indeed, multiply 

 richness and capacity. 



The next major breakthrough in increasing overall malleability 

 of living things became possible only when the nervous system 

 had become large enough and sufficiently complex to generate 

 those new capacities of interaction which led to culture. Culture, 

 while not completely limited to man, is tremendously more 

 enveloping for this social animal, and I suggest four sub-epochs 

 in its development. The first stage of culture probably can be 

 dated from the invention of the symbol, the use of an arbitrary 

 sign for a thing, a communicable representation of the outside 

 world. Next came organized symbols, which are language, as a 

 tremendous advance, and tested organized symbols, which are 

 science, as a further great step. I strongly suspect that we are 

 just entering a fourth epoch in increased malleability of collective 

 man with the invention and rapid growth of the computer, a 

 prosthetic instrument for thinking, much as bulldozers are for 

 muscles and telescopes and microphones are for receptors. 



In fact, perhaps the most interesting thing about present-day 

 man is that the world in which he lives, the one that matters, 

 that gives problems and satisfactions, is no longer very much a 

 material world of "things." These have been taken care of. We 

 have established homeostatic control of our physical and biological 

 environment so that these no longer present our primary problems. 

 We live as social beings in an ocean of information, information 

 that did not exist before we created it. Languages of all sorts, 

 pictures of all sorts, a great variety of communication means and 

 contents — these are the things that matter to us. Our interactions 

 with other human beings, mainly at the symbolic level, are what 

 we care about. Indeed, the storing, processing, and retrieving of 

 information at the machine level are undergoing such tremendous 

 advances that the entire transmittal and use of the information 

 which is the corpus of our culture will soon be revolutionized. 



There is still another exciting aspect of the evolution of mallea- 

 bility that requires mention. In the earlier phases, this evolution 

 took place primarily by a biological, Darwinian kind of process; 



