Re: Is evolution accelerating?

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 14:21:16 +1000, John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>r norman wrote:
>> On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 11:04:08 +1000, John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>>> OK, let's address each point.
>>>
>>> 1. Mutation. Novel cultural variants ("good ideas") are essentially randomly
>>> generated. There is no ability of epistemic systems to predict what will work
>>> - that is why we have to do science by experiment rather than definition or
>>> postulation. That we learn from the past in order to restrict the field of
>>> viable candidates is itself evidence of past cultural evolution,a nd
>>> occasionally a brainfart works out although it isn't part of the field of
>>> acceptable alternatives.
>>
>> This is false. I can have all sorts of ideas, but I sometimes
>> actually think about them before expressing them. I ponder the
>> consequences, whether they are reasonable, whether they are morally
>> sound, whether they will contribute towards producing a good and just
>> society, whether they will make me a million dollars. (That is, I am
>> quite capable of doing that if I choose. I don't actually bother when
>> coming up with ideas to spout off about on talk. origins!) Also, I
>> get the best planners around to predict what the future will be like
>> and what will work best. Only then do I promulgate my ideas to the
>> public and let cultural selection work. But even worse, I gather up
>> an army and order the population on pain of death to adopt my ideas
>> and teach them to the next generation. None of that has a biological
>> counterpart.
>
>So there is a smaller scale process of random generation and selection based
>on prior experience going on in your head. The "population" of ideas is
>subjected to selection both before and after you express them
>
>Work done on this by, for example, Margaret Boden, shows that the idea of
>there being a "community of mind" to use Minsky's phrase is correct. And on
>pain of ignoring Hume's Problem of Induction, you cannot say that you will
>correctly forecast the outcome of any of those ideas before the fact if they
>are employed in an entirely novel context - at best you only know what worked
>int he past.

The notion of latent ideas completely unknown and unknowable to
anybody in the universe except one's own internal consciousness is a
strange subject to build a testable theory on.

>>> 2. Laterality. There are two aspects to this. One is the lateral transfer
>>> across traditions (like borrowing, for example, Kabbalistic ideas in alchemy
>>> during the later middle ages), which is analogous to lateral genetic transfer.
>>> Only the physical mechanisms are different. The other is lateral transfer
>>> within generations. The problem here is a bit more sophisticated, so let me
>>> explain what I am doing.
>>>
>>> The "parent" and "child" relationship is defined by transmission. The parents
>>> of my allele for blue eyes are of course the alleles in my organismic-level
>>> parents. So I have organism parents, mum and dad, and gene parents, allele
>>> blueyes in dad, and allele blueyes in mum. But suppose that the organism
>>> lineage and the genetic lineage didn't match. Then I would have several
>>> parent-child lineages. Culture is like that. The "child" of the organisms and
>>> the "child" of the cultural transmission are *different entities*. I am a
>>> child of David Hull in the philosophy of science, for example, although he is
>>> (quite openly) gay and has no biological progeny.
>>
>> The "parent-child" relationship is necessarily a simply connected
>> network mathematically. Yes the tree of descent can branch and then
>> rejoin but there can be no flow of information (genetic material)
>> traveling in a circle back to the parent. The flow of cultural
>> information can easily flow in a circle from me to you to many other
>> people and then back to me. Once you have a circular relationship of
>> cause and effect, you have the problems of recursion and
>> self-reference. All sorts of new phenomena arise from exactly this
>> circularity (yes, I definitely do mean to say emergent phenomena
>> here). This circularity, this self reference, is the basis of logical
>> paradoxes. The circularity of information flow is an entirely new
>> process that can occur in cultural evolution but not in biological.
>
>Each case is a new vertex in the graph. The only reason you think it is
>"circular" is because you identify nodes based on biological location (i.e.,
>in your own head). But the flow of information is linear.
>
>In short, you are *still* bookkeeping culture with respect to organisms.

Yes I "was". See below.

<snip the convoluted context that prompted the next remark>

>Just put your head on this table next to the complete edition of _The
>Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_....

Is the game to see which is denser and more impenetrable?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here begins my real posting. But first a couple of meta-notes.

First, it might seem that you have the advantage since you have
actually pondered the notion of cultural evolution for some time,
explored it in detail, and even made yourself familiar with what
others have written professionally and in the primary literature on
the subject, not to mention having made your own contributions.
However, the advantage is mine, not only because of my keen intellect,
but because I am not at all burdened by any of the above baggage!

Second, I did in fact assume that cultural ideas were tied to
individual organisms, people to be specific, just as genes are. I
realized that fact sometime early this morning while lying in the
darkness pondering just why I wasn't asleep. But separating out the
memes, or whatever you want to call them, as disembodied entities
floating "out there" in the aggregate mental space of humanity doesn't
help: see the real content below.

I now propose two (insurmountable) objections to the notion that
cultural evolution parallels biological evolution in anything much
more (note the careful hedge) than metaphor.

First, the fact is that the subject matter of biological evolution,
genes (more properly, the genetic composition of a population), has a
physical reality while the subject matter of cultural evolution does
not. This, in fact, is exactly the point you raised about my
mistakenly "bookkeeping culture with respect to organisms." Genes
(admittedly a difficult word used in different senses by different
people, but you know what I mean) originally were associated somewhat
vaguely with "traits" that could be inherited. But molecular biology
has in fact demonstrated that they are also associated with specific
sequences of DNA that are connected with those traits (albeit often in
a very circuitous and sometimes non-deterministic way). That means it
really is possible to actually measure the genetic composition of a
population experimentally. Conceptually all you have to do is to
sequence the genome of every member of the population. Practically,
population genetics has given us tools to make excellent estimates of
gene frequency. For example, every intro biology students who comes
into contact (intellectually, not physically) with me has gone through
the exercise of counting the fraction of the class population with
detached earlobes, tongue curling ability, PTH tasting, etc. and then
computed the frequency of the recessive allele as the square root of
the frequency of the recessive phenotype. It is a silly exercise to
illustrate Hardy-Weinberg algebra (although no one ever mentions that
the class is not a population in H-W equilibrium) but it does
emphasize the point that, given appropriate conditions (assumption of
a near equilibrium and knowledge of pattern of heritablility) it is
indeed possible to measure something not directly observed (gene
frequencies) from something that is observed (phenotype frequencies).;

Now compare "cultural ideas" or "memes" or "ideas" or whatever they
are. They exist, as far as we know, only in our mind. We have
absolutely no idea what that means in terms of our physical brain.
And they are evanescent, flickering in and out like vapors. We can
hold completely contradictory ideas simultaneously, variously acting
upon first the one then the other. We can change our minds in an
instant. We can pretend to believe one thing when asked but really do
something else. Yes, organisms can alter their phenotype and can even
lie about it (as in mimicry) but the process tends to be rather slow
and stodgy, not instantaneous as with ideas. Worse, the very act of
measuring or observing somebody's opinion can in fact change it. This
is something far in excess of the physical process in which a
measurement alters the measured based on Heisenberg uncertainty. That
uncertainty is, in fact, a very precise expression between two very
definable features. Measuring position does not totally alter the
experiment, it just renders uncertain the momentum. Measuring ideas
alters them in ways completely unpredictable. You might then be left
with examining, not the ideas, themselves, but physical traces that
they may leave -- studying jet aircraft by looking at their contrails.
The connection between gene and phenotype is something that used to be
rather difficult; the trend now is to look at genetic diversity
directly by sequencing DNA and that is absolute. There is no
equivalent in cultural evolution. The connection between the specific
nature of the ideas and the physical traces they leave is far too
ambiguous except in very special cases. I don't even know that you
can ascribe a reality to the notion of an "idea frequency" and you
will have to convince me that there really are good experimental
methods to measure it.

In addition, the connection between gene and organism is even more
fundamental than the physical reality of the gene. The "measure" that
selection works under is something called "fitness". We go to great
lengths to explain that fitness is not a circular notion -- what is
fit is not merely what gets selected. Fitness is, in fact, closely
tied to the fact that it influences the organism that possesses that
genome; its longevity, its fecundity, its parental success. And
fitness is something that is stable -- once you are endowed with that
genome, that is what you keep through your reproductive years.
Further, your offspring will obtain a genome that is clearly derived
from your own (and your partner's). With ideas, this connection no
longer applies. What is the measure of ":fitness" apart from its
success in getting passed on? Can you demonstrate the non-circularity
of that definition? Can you be confident that the mechanism of
transmission (its reproduction) or its survival has anything
whatsoever to do with the "fitness" of the idea as opposed to the
fickleness of its possessor, a trait that is in no way correlated with
the idea, itself? Can you even insure that the offspring of an idea
has much connection with the original idea? If every reproductive
step involves so much mutation that children only vaguely resemble
their parents, then we would have a difficult time recognizing
evolution.

I will agree that there are aspects of cultural evolution that work
slowly enough -- the structure of language, of religious ritual
associated with life events, most of the traditional material of
anthropologists -- so that there really is a close connection between
ideas and individuals. The ideas tends to remain fixed for years and
years and societies, at least pre-industrial societies, had cultural
transmission mechanisms that were very conservative. In those cases
you might make a reasonable comparison between cultural and biological
evolution. Even then, there were problems. How valid were Margaret
Mead's notions of sexuality among the Samoans? Modern life has made
communication of ideas a radically different story. Ideas can spread
instantaneously (nearly) around the world. Are "pet rocks" and "hip
hop slang" in the same league as the traditional "marriage taboos" or
"dropped initial aspirated 'h' sound"? Even if cultural evolution
theory based on biological evolution is successful in certainly
clearly defined areas, is that enough to build a general theory?

In short, are the fundamental elements of cultural evolution
"entities" that can be defined and measured scientifically?

The second point has to with your utter rejection of emergent
properties. It is this obstinate reductionism that causes you to
argue that, since ideas are the product of the human brain and since
the human brain is the product of evolution, then ideas (hence
cultural evolution) are the product of evolution. There is a shred of
truth in those statements -- they are each true. But they don't lead
to the conclusion that, therefore, cultural evolution is just an
extension of biological evolution. As an argumentum ad absurdum (or
whatever the Latin is), all of biology is chemistry is physics. So
therefore I should be able to solve the Schrodinger equation for a DNA
molecule to determine the fitness of the resulting organism in any
given environment. It might be a difficult and lengthy computation
but it is, in fact, doable in concept. No it is not.

Once the physics and chemistry of a system reaches a certain level of
complexity, the system adopts a completely new pattern of dynamics.
In fact, there can be a sharp threshold in systems between those which
show the new dynamics and those which do not. The new dynamics, the
new set of solutions to the system equations, is called "life". That
is, "life" is a physical system whose dynamic trajectory (in a
suitably defined mathematical phase space) is confined to a particular
basin of attraction (a technical term) called the "living state".
Having that basin is, in fact, exactly the new dynamics not possessed
by an inanimate system. And the biological system (one which
possesses such a basin) can in fact, have a trajectory that leaves the
basin. In that case, the system dies. The point is that there are
completely new concepts: "life" and "death" possessed by such a system
that are not possessed by a slightly different though apparently
almost equivalent dynamic system. And, when you get to a
self-reproducing system with an imperfect information copying system,
you get "factors" or "genes" or "informational segments" that can
mutate and influence fitness and produce evolution. In other words, I
claim that evolution is an emergent property of such a biological
system of replicating organisms with imperfectly heritable features
that determine ability to live, function, and reproduce and pass on
those features to the next generation.

I now claim that a system that allows ideas to be generated and to
become copied from one organism to another albeit in different form
has crossed another threshold into a new dynamic system called
"culture". In this new scheme, there are completely new properties
that are quite reminiscent of those of the underlying biological
system we call evolution. However, these new entities have their own
properties and, especially, their own dynamics so that the theory of
cultural evolution is, indeed, quite a different creature from the
theory of biological evolution.

In no way do I deny the existence of cultural evolution or that
interesting studies can be made of its processes. I only claim that
it bears only passing resemblance to biological evolution.

So there!


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Is evolution accelerating?
    ... >>> that such culture is separate and apart from their biological evolution. ... >> cultural evolution must be treated separate from biological. ... > out to be irrelevant to the main dynamics of cultural evolution. ... you can't ask if culture evolves more rapidly than biology ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: No distinction between artificial and natural selection - John
    ... cultural evolution much before Hull. ... Culture is not isolated from biology. ... the boundaries that biology sets. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: No distinction between artificial and natural selection - John
    ... cultural evolution much before Hull. ... Culture is not isolated from biology. ... As to the non sequitur about whether they are published in journals on ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Locust Grove mans book challenges
    ... definition and the problem of identifying individuality, ... I am thinking about biology in general here, ... about evolution. ... So I believe that the organism plays a special role in the world even ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: United Methodist Minister not happy about new policy
    ... the theory of evolution is not in conflict with theology. ... Methodist pastor who was a former high school biology teacher, ... gene structure or mutations are beneficial to the organism, ...
    (talk.origins)