Re: Life's complexity: self-organization, evolution or both?


"Raving" <raving.loonie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 13, 6:40 pm, "Perplexed in Peoria" <jimmene...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
If you don't like 'order on the edge of chaos' then the following will
please you ...

In case you haven't noticed from the above, I am quite skeptical
of the whole pile of BS which has grown up around this slogan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1/f_noise

I'm not sure what your point is. Perhaps something related to the
claims that are occasionally made that ecosystem complexity tends
to evolve to a kind of self-organized criticality in which local
extinctions take on a 1/f pattern.

That may well be true, but organism complexity and ecosystem
complexity are completely different animals. NS (i.e. reproduction
and genetic inheritance) is central in explaining organism complexity.
But NS isn't much involved in explaining ecosystem complexity.
Ecosystems are MUCH simpler than organisms, and their evolution is
something even a physicist can understand.

.

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