Evolution increases the computational ability of organisms.

What does this mean? In Roger Lewin's _Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos_, in Chapter 7 "Complexity and the Reality of Progress", he interviews Norman Packard and there is the following exchange:

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I can see what might be meant by computation in organisms that have a brain of reasonable size, I said to Norman, but what about clams and trees? "Survival has to do with gathering information about the environment and responding appropriately," Norman answered, clearly echoing Ayala. "Bacteria do that, by responding to the presence or absence of certain chemicals and by moving. Tree communicate chemically too. Computation is a fundamental property of complex adaptive systems, which, you'll remember, is optimized at the edge of chaos. Any complex adaptive system can compute; that's the key point. You don't have to have a brain to process information in the way I'm talking about it." But it helps? "It's higher on the scale of computational ability, if you like."

When you say "higher on the scale", I asked Norman, are you suggesting a history of successive increases in computational ability in evolution? "That's how it looks to me," he replied. "Intuitively, it seems reasonable that the task of survival requires computation. If that's true, then selection among organisms will lead to an increase in computational abilities. That creates an arrow of change, not just a drift upward."

Most species on Earth today are single-celled organisms, as in the pre-Cambrian, and much of the rest are insects, I said. That doesn't look like inexorable progress to greater computational ability, does it? "We're talking about survival, " said Norman. "And, yes, there are countless niches out there in which species do very well with certain levels of computational abilities. But where survival is contested, mostly you will see an increase. Think of it as a constant exploration of the utility of increased computational complexity in evolution. Sometimes it gives an advantage, and that gives you the arrow."
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--p. 138 & 139


Of course, this isn't exactly a new idea. Lewin writes:

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For example, in a classic text on evolution by Theodosius Dobzhansky, Francisco Ayala, G. Ledyard Stebbins, and James Valentine, the "ability to gather and process information" is said to have increased through evolutionary history, and, indeed, to be a mark of progress. A few years ago I attended a conference at the Field Museum in Chicago, where the topic was "evolutionary progress." Francisco Ayala was one of the first to speak. "The ability to obtain and process information about the environment, and to react accordingly, is an important adaptation because it allows that organism to seek out suitable environments and resources and avoid unsuitable ones," he said. Edward O. Wilson also considers information processing as a measure of complexity. "No question about it," he told me. "There's been a gradual increase in information processing over the last 550 million years, and particularly in the last 150 million years." If at least some biologists and the dynamical systems people collectively point to information processing as a mark complexity, we may be getting somewhere.
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--p. 137 & 138


Here's an example of information processing inside E. coli:

"But how can an individual bacterium, locked into the genome it has inherited, cope with environmental fluctuation?"

"Think, for instance, of an E. coli living in the erratic environment of a human colon, dependent for its nutrients on the whimsical eating habits of its host. If the bacterium is deprived of the amino acid tryptophan, which it needs to survey, it responds by activating a metabolic pathway to make its own tryptophan from another compound. Later, if the human eats a tryptophan-rich meal, the bacterial cell stops producing tryptophan for itself, thus saving the cell from squandering it resources to produce a substance that is available from the surrounding solution in prefabricated form. This is just one example of how bacteria tune their metabolism to changing environments."


Campbell & Reese, _Biology_, 6th ed., p. 347


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx


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  • Re: Evolution increases the computational ability of organisms.
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    (talk.origins)