Re: The entailments of evolution...

[Judith Rosen <***>]

John M. wrote:
> Judith, you read more into my simpleminded sentence
> than was intended when I wrote it.

My first instinct was to rush in and tell you that your sentence was not simpleminded... but then I clued-in that this had to be one of your half-joking, deliberately-opposite-from-the-truth statements. Either that, or the phrase "simple-minded" translates into a Hungarian mind differently than it does in mine! (I have you filed in my brain under "curmudgeon"-- almost an archetype, in fact, but you have never come across as "simpleminded" in my view. Just thought I'd state it for the record. True, it's a back-handed compliment... but I doubt you'd appreciate the more direct kind!)

Even though it's risking another "you read too much into it" lecture, I think your clarification is worth some comment, too. You wrote:
> "science" takes snapshots (from time to time) of the
> actual image of the model it observes and those, that
> perished intermittently between such snapsots do not
> show up at all. Out of sight....So science does not
> take into account those disappeared variations at all.

In a sense, the entire fossil record is a roster of "disappeared variations"-- at least, that's how I look at it. I suspect what you are referring to are the variations not in the fossil record, though, am I right? You are talking about the various mutations which didn't survive to reproduce and were only alive for a nanosecond of evolutionary time? If so, then I think we have examples of that kind of variation all the time; even living examples. Like albinism, or animals born without an immune system, or organisms which are born with an ability to exploit a new food source or environmental context (which is how I view the development of more virulent pathogens and pathogens which used to be incapable of infecting humans but can now be a very serious threat to us). The amount of change and diversity in the evolution of certain "domesticated" animals gives us some clues into the entailments of evolution, it seems to me. The wide ranging variety of dog breeds, for example, which are almost entirely based on wolf DNA, according to the latest analyses. (Although... I have to admit I find it hard to believe that all current dog breeds sprang from wolves. I suspect there has been far more mixing of concurrently appearing variations all though evolutionary time than most accounts of evolutionary history suggest. Perhaps wolves had some of the same ancient ancestors as most dog breeds, but that doesn't mean that all modern breeds are directly descended from wolves.)  However, whether it's true or not, we can still conclude logically that all of that potential was already present in the ancestral community of feral dogs. It's amazing to realize that Dalmations, Chihuahuas, and Irish Setters, for example, all sprang from the canines of long ago, and yet here they are. In the absence of genetic engineering, we can only use natural forces and time in domesticating various species but we've been doing a whole lot of that for eons. Perhaps these issues are due for a reassessment of what we're actually seeing: I would suggest using the examples of domestication to probe the entailments of evolution.

This discussion brings up another thought not directly based on John's posts: Every time there was some climatic cataclysm, as evidenced from the fossil record,  which radically altered the weather on a global or even regional scale, there were massive die-offs/extinctions. I don't see how this can be explained if both adaptation and extinction are based on a reactive paradigm for living organism behavior. If adaptation could be explained by that paradigm (which Robert Rosen said it could not be), then how can the widespread die-offs be explained? As a corollary to that question, I wonder why certain species have survived all the past cataclysms? Sharks, ferns, ginko trees.... these are organisms which we find in the fossil record and which are still happily living on the planet today. What capabilities do they have that allowed this kind of adaptability? The answers to that question could shed a lot of light on the entailments of adaptation without evolution and also perhaps prove or disprove some of my father's theories about anticipation and internal predictive models. For instance: Do these species have fewer internal predictive models than the ones that went extinct? Or are their models somehow critically  different (less specific, perhaps)? 

Food for thought...

Judith



Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Nov 9, 2005, at 11:39 AM, John M wrote:

> Judith, you read more into my simpleminded sentence
> than was intended when I wrote it.
> No fancy 'connotations', just the simple fact that
> "science" takes snapshots (from time to time) of the
> actual image of the model it observes and those, that
> perished intermittently between such snapsots do not
> show up at all. Out of sight....So science does not
> take into account those disappeared variations at all.
>
> That's all I wanted to point to
> John
>
> --- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:
>
> > Hi John M.
> >
> > There's one comment from your post I can't resist
> > commenting on in 
> > return. Where you said:
> > > How about those that perish? They underwent
> > exactly
> > > the same principles and goofed their survival.
> >
> > It's true of "those that perish" as well.
> > Model-based behavior is not 
> > infallible-- quite the contrary. It's only as good
> > as its models. The 
> > models themselves are apparently not very open to
> > adaptation, just as 
> > genetic codes don't radically change within an
> > organism's lifetime. So, 
> > if the context changes radically enough to no longer
> > fit the model, 
> > every behavior the organism generates based on its
> > model is going to be 
> > inappropriate to some degree-- perhaps fatally.
> > Model-based behavior 
> > fails in characteristic ways and these are patterns
> > exhibited by living 
> > systems, as well. It should be easy enough to design
> > experiments to 
> > prove or disprove this. Anyone out there in a
> > position to run the 
> > experiments and want to publish the results?
> >
> > Judith