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

Perplexed in Peoria wrote:



(snip)

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.

Arguable. One doesn't ordinarily think of ecosystems as having excess
reproduction. But they might be considered to have heritable fitness. I
don't think one should completely dismiss the idea of ecosystems competing.

Ecosystems are MUCH simpler than organisms, and their evolution is
something even a physicist can understand.

This seems extraordinarily unlikely on the face of it. Ecosystems are
composed of a large number of organisms. All our experience with other
systems tells us that aggregations of large numbers of subunits results in
greater complexity than that exhibited by any of the subunits.

--
Yours, Bill Morse

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