Re: Life without evolution/evolution without life?

[John Kineman <***>]

Howard, Judith;

This is an interesting exchange, as I find nothing shocking or
unreasonable about the idea that life can exist before evolution.
Evolution is what life does. Evolution itself is not an actor, but a
system behvior. It can at most magnify a property that is already there.

To understand this one need only distinguish between life form and life
principle. Life forms are a product of evolution. Evolotion is a product
of life principle (perhaps complexity).

It is clear that we are alive today, regardless of whether or not we
continue to evolve. It is thus clear that we have evolved to our current
form, but not at all clear that evolution is a necessary pre-condition
for life itself, however that essence is defined.

I think it is probably going to be much easier to explain how
anticipatory systems explain evolution than the other way around. In
fact, I have already made an attempt to do so in a 1999 ISSS paper. I
attributed the basic ideas to Rosen and Baldwin. Basically if form and
function are always in a complementarity relationship, and that is the
basis of life, then as they attempt to model each other through
anticipation, there will be error in that modeling on both sides. That
generates change in both form and function, hence evolution.
Anticipatory systems probably must evolve.

Howard: On what do you base the assertion that "life did not suddenly
exist"??? I would agree if we are talking about evolved forms, but not
if we are talking about life princple, or complexity, which i think is
the driver for evolution of forms. My counter-assertion is that the
principle itself did not evolve.

JJK

Howard Pattee wrote:

> Hi Judith,
>
> Here we have some healthy differences of opinion:
>
> [Judith] Is it shocking to say that life has to exist first before life can
> evolve into multiple levels/creatures/ecosystems?
>
> [Howard] It is not shocking but it is unreasonable and explains nothing.
> Life did not suddenly “exist” but arose gradually from non-living
> organizations of matter. There were several billion years of pre-Darwinian
> types of evolution that is the subject of much study today.
>
> [Judith] Or that it is possible to learn about life in the organismal
> sense, without knowing anything about how certain organisms evolved into
> what they are today?
>
> [Howard] Of course one can “learn about life” in innumerable ways. What you
> learn will depend on what questions you ask. What is the problem that
> arouses your curiosity? Following Bob, I would ask for a causal or
> explanatory model of life, and this would have to include a theory of its
> evolution. Any purely descriptive model of life, “organismal” or not,
> without any causal history I think he would call just simulation.
>
> [Judith] Learning about complex, living, anticipatory systems may tell us a
> lot about evolution of species, but theories of how evolution
> happened/happens don't do much to explain how life "works", why it exists,
> what causes it, etc.
>
> [Howard] Here I’m afraid we just disagree on both counts. I will tell you
> how theories of evolution explain how life works, if you will tell me how
> anticipatory systems explain evolution.
>
> Howard

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© 2004 John J. Kineman
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