Re: Evolution increases the computational ability of organisms.

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 08:48:02 -0600, dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

r norman wrote:
On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:28:38 -0600, dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


John Harshman wrote:

r norman wrote:


[snip for brevity]

and out of a sense of mercy

I can go on and on with examples but you get the picture. There is no
inevitable drive to produce a hominid, a dipteran, a liliacean. But
for every tip of the evolutionary tree that exists, there is a
progressive accumulation of features from the root across every
branching point, until you get to the tip. That is the nature of
evolutionary 'progress'.

Progress is "whatever happens"? I would not call this progress.
Direction is "wherever you happen to go"? I guess also that I find
reversal to be more common than you do. You can always find some
characters that haven't reversed all that much, given the number of
characters there are. I don't see this as translating to progress or
directionality. Nor, I expect, would it satisfy dkomo very much, if he's
still around.

It doesn't satisfy me at all because you guys are still erecting,
charging and knocking down the strawman of species specificity in a
reductionistic fashion, with all its infinitely small detail and
innumerable examples. You miss the "big picture".

Hint: try looking at the *entire* "tree of life" today (even after the
battering it has taken due to human activity) and compare it to, say,
the tree of life 550 million years ago. Notice anything different? Is
it just possible that one tree is more complex *as a whole* than the
other? Duh?



That reductionistic look at details is called 'doing science'.


So is synthesis. I would argue that the construction of overarching
theories that encompass and explain massive amounts of reductionistic
data is more important. Examples: the theory of evolution, Newton's laws.

You don't favor the following view, do you:

"In science, there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting."
Such are the famous words of Ernest Rutherford."

http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com/Article/Stamp-Collecting-in-Science/1325

I deny that the tree of life today is more 'complex' than that of 550
million years ago. We have very little idea of what the tree of
microbial life really looks like but that enormous mass of the tree,
the part where most of the complexity and variability resides,
probably looks virtually the same as that of 550 million years ago.

Have you seen Woese's famous branching tree of ribosomal RNA he used
to illustrate the three domains? It is three highly elaborate fans of
branches. One of the fans with its elaborate structure has one tiny
little end arm which splits into three teensy little terminal twigs:
one labeled Coprinus, one labeled Zea and one labeled Homo. These are
the entire fungal, plant, and animal kingdoms. If you want
complexity, it doesn't reside in how those particular twigs expanded.
(Science 726:735, 1997)

All that has happened in the last 550 million years is a bunch more
branches and terminal twigs. I deny that a branching tree structure
becomes more 'complex' just by adding more nodes.


I used the tree of life metaphor so I could make a quick sound bite in
last night's post. What I really had in mind was a comprehensive
catalog of all of today's organisms, describing their structures,
metabolisms, behavior, ecological niches, interactions with other
organisms, reproductive mechanisms, and so forth. For sheer diversity,
and for the range of biological innovation, today's catalog is unmatched
compared to that of catalogs in the past.

And note carefully that I'm saying that even if there were three million
different species of reptiles during the Mesozoic of all different sizes
and body types, they were still reptiles living in the same basic type
of environment, and so didn't match the diversity and complexity of the
animal world today.

I read somewhere recently that the Cambrian Explosion established the
major themes of life, with little variation on those themes at the time.
Everything since then has been endless elaborations on those themes.
I say it is the totality of all that elaboration that constitutes the
complexity of life.

What about "bacteria world" before eukaryotes came along? I don't care
how much variation those bacteria displayed. They were still nothing
more than microscopic little fuggers that were blind, deaf and dumb.
The total complexity of all them doesn't come anywhere close to the
complexity of today's living world.


That is a very anthropocentric and completely myopic view of life.

Actually, if you really were myopic, you would be able to see the
microbes more clearly. And if you were hyperopic I would have to
acknowledge you were 'far-sighted'. So I guess I would have to
conclude that you are really blind to the reality that is not
immediately visible on the human size scale.

For example: " that the Cambrian Explosion established the major
themes of life" should really read " the Cambrian Explosion
established the major themes of life for one particular group of
organisms, the majority of biological entities having already been
around and thoroughly diversified for hundreds of millions of years".

.

Relevant Pages