Now, it just cannot be the result of natural selection that biological forms show the same forms we also witness in spiraling minerals and in spiral galaxies. And when we find a “solution” in living beings that turns out to be optimal with respect to many millions of conceivable (and computable, these days, with fast computers) alternatives, it cannot have been selected out of random trials. There have not been dozens of millions of generations of macaques trying out all sorts of cortical patterns of connections, such that only the best survived. That’s ridiculous.
Some people, completely outside of the ID field and for different reasons, think natural selection doesn't explain evolution as according to natural selection. Nevertheless, the ID camp might at least be pleased that the holes they are finding in evolution does indeed call for a fresh perspective. The result would not prove or disprove God's existence, but it does, I think, reinforce the miracle of life, and the patterns that tame chaos.
An interesting article. Links below.
Related Link: Evolution hits the wall
Some people, completely outside of the ID field and for different reasons, think natural selection doesn't explain evolution as according to natural selection. Nevertheless, the ID camp might at least be pleased that the holes they are finding in evolution does indeed call for a fresh perspective. The result would not prove or disprove God's existence, but it does, I think, reinforce the miracle of life, and the patterns that tame chaos.
An interesting article. Links below.
Related Link: Evolution hits the wall
On a related topic: teh evolution of aliens and where teh ehck are they?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/?a=f
This MIT article addresses the old chestnut, "where the hell are all the damn aliens!?"
His central idea is one from economics, he calls it "The Great Filter". Something so improbably and difficult to scale that it effectively halts progress in most situations.
He asks whether it is because of a "great filter" restricting progress that have failed to detect alien civilizations. He asks whether the "great filter" is behind us, something biological way back in evolutionary time, or still before us.
Covers a lot of ground.
By the way, the CERN Large Hadron Collider starts experiments soon? Is that the "great filter"?
++++++++++++
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW.
May 2008.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/?a=f
I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form--some bacteria, some algae--it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, certainly--but a bad omen for the future of the human race.
How do I arrive at this conclusion? I begin by reflecting on a well-known fact. UFO spotters, Raëlian cultists, and self-certified alien abductees notwithstanding, humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial civilization. We have not received any visitors from space, nor have our radio telescopes detected any signals transmitted by any extraterrestrial civilization. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been going for nearly half a century, employing increasingly powerful telescopes and data-mining techniques; so far, it has consistently corroborated the null hypothesis. As best we have been able to determine, the night sky is empty and silent. The question "Where are they?" is thus at least as pertinent today as it was when the physicist Enrico Fermi first posed it during a lunch discussion with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1950...
...proceed to URL above...
The quote you give is completely and utterly incorrect. Evolution by natural selection (with is *not* random) can very easily produce those biological forms. The same patterns turn up in many situations because of an underlying physical basis. For example, a minimization of energy or maximization of a resource. In the case of leaves around a stem of a plant, the pattern we see is one that seeks to optimize access to moisture, rainfall and sunlight. A less than optimal member of a species will have a certain leaf arrangement. If one of its offspring has a mutation which gives a more optimal leaf arrangement it will grow faster and stronger and produce more robust offspring. The new mutation will spread among the population and hey presto we get a more optimized leaf pattern. This is evolution, and it can indeed produce order form chaos. This is how in all the millions of trials the best survive. Life is not immune to the underlying mathematics of the Universe.
ReplyDeleteEvolution explains the diversity of life brilliantly. ID explains zilch.
Err, did you read the whole link Christoper? Not about ID.
ReplyDeleteThis is how in all the millions of trials the best survive.
Aha! This is exactly the point the author makes. Except that there are not millions of trials to work out the optimal brain stem nerve network. And the thought there are millions of mutations, with the optimal one spreading, presupposes all the other millions of mutations in other areas of the body are happening in the "winning" gene around the same time.
I like his theory better than yours, at the moment.
Although you might want to read more of it, because there is an overlap with what you are also saying.
What the article seems to be hinting at, and this is qualified given my limited knowledge of complex biology (though I guess the same applies to the poster of this) is some deeper organisational force at work as opposed to natural selection. Whether this is an 'in' for ID is equivocal to my mind.
ReplyDeleteChristopher's point that this is systemic rather than organisational still seems valid though.
Even still this is not evolution hitting a wall, stop being silly.
Err, did you read the whole link Christoper? Not about ID.
ReplyDeleteI was referring to your comment there. Of course natural selection isn't the be-all and end all of evolution. It is an important part of it though. Nobody in the ID movement is contributing any science though.
Except that there are not millions of trials to work out the optimal brain stem nerve network.
There were millions of creatures evolving from creatures with primitive brain stems, over millions of years. There were millions of trials. And there aren't millions of other competing mutations in a single body competing. There seems to be an optimization going on in the brain stem, with the aim of minimizing the total length of the connections. This can be selected for.
I also don't see how he can justify his assertion that evolution by natural selection can't produce new species and phyla.
There were millions of creatures evolving from creatures with primitive brain stems, over millions of years.
ReplyDeleteBut at what point does divergence kick in? Each component isn't taking turns to optimize itself. It seems to me, looking at the periods involved and the scale of complexity to select *the best* bits and pieces, across entire organisms, and yet diverge and mutate/evolve is a big call by the natural selection camp.
Not that I know much about all this, it just seems the current stuff I've read on natural selection and evolution is very, err, optimistic in its predictions. To mind mind, there have to be a few other factors at play.
This theory is interesting for that reason.
Ahah, you've found yourself a structuralist.
ReplyDeleteThe point that Piattelli-Palmarini and his colleagues are trying to make is that some structures in biology arise because they have been selected for but because that's just the way the the stuff that makes up biological systems works. As an example I can't imagine that anyone thinks that each ridge on their fingerprints are the the culmination of millions of trials of sub-optimal finger-ridge patterns. Fingerprints might be selected for but the actual pattern you get is largely the result of an interaction with the developmental process and the physical properties of the molecules making them.
Structuralism has a rich history, D'Arcy Thompson wrote a beautifully written and utterly wrong book about it and people like Stephen Jay Gould have supported more pluralistic ideas in evolution (as opposed to the English school's commitment to selection and gene-centric evolution). The modern development of evolutionary development aims to see how genetic networks, development and the physical paramters in the environment work to make organisms
But, for me at least, the hard-core neo-structuralists fail on two points. They complain that evolutionary biologists think every structure of every organism arises from selection - which is not true. And they fail utterly to explain how the interesting things in biology - the ones that look they are designed my have evolved. Can anyone imagine that a birds wing is just an inherent property of eggs and a few molecules?
The more sane arguments from the evo-devo crowd, that we won't really understand how evolution works until we understand the system that selection is acting on hold a lot more weight for me.
Right, that brief history of evolutionary thought aside lets see what you've had to say
And the thought there are millions of mutations, with the optimal one spreading, presupposes all the other millions of mutations in other areas of the body are happening in the "winning" gene around the same time.
I don't get it. Do you mean that you need a whole suite of mutations to occur at once to "upgrade a system". That certainly isn't true. Because your genes are reshuffled everytime you make sperms or eggs on a population level each gene can be selected for on it's own merits without needing to drag others with it. This actual makes for one of those testable hypotheses real biologists go in for, areas that don't get shuffled so often ought to have low diversity because they will be dragged along with any sequence that is selected for. Lo and behold when you look at genomes this is what you find.
But at what point does divergence kick in? Each component isn't taking turns to optimize itself. It seems to me, looking at the periods involved and the scale of complexity to select *the best* bits and pieces, across entire organisms, and yet diverge and mutate/evolve is a big call by the natural selection camp.
Again I don't quite get it. Do you mean that modifications are often contingent on changes to multiple genes in a network or multiple systems that play in to each other? Again you don't need to sit in your armchair and think about how hard this is to do - you can look at the evidence. Networks are pretty robust to change and changes that might have little or now effect at one point in time might utterly change the fitness landscape - opening the door to later changes that allow new functions to be arrived at.
Ok, that's probably enough from me. My take home message is that to the degree that Structuralism is sensible (some things aren't directly the result of selection) it hardly constitutes a hole or a wall that the ID folk can cheer for.
Thanks, that was helpful. So was my experiment on post titles. Another example of natural selection?
ReplyDeleteTHE BIGGER PICTURE IN THE DEBATE ON DARWINISM IS NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN.
ReplyDeleteThe reason is elementary: the Discovery Institute and other ID proponents leave out the Triune God, Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Hence, Richard Dawkins can make the case for “aliens” seeding the earth.
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