From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Mon Apr 19 2004 - 19:59:56 MDT
[Blunderov]
I'm not to sure how much confidence I can place in the statement "Natural selection is severely limited both in its power to promote useful genes and in its freedom to tinker with morphology."
There was some interesting research a little while back from, I think, The University of California, about master genes; capable of controlling groups of genes in order to effect quite dramatic changes in morphology.
(Interesting is that one of the fundy arguments against the theory of evolution is this very contention - that natural selection cannot properly account for the dramatic changes in morphology that are claimed.)
[rhinoceros]
Of course, ultimately everything will have to be expressed in the genes. There is not much else there for pattern storage, is it? I think the argument is more about the mechanism. No doubt, random mutation, survival of the fittest and mating selection could turn a baloon shape into a cube, given infinite time and a challenging enough environment.
If mutation had the time to produce gilled people then a cataclysm would give them the advantage by wiping out most of the non-gilled ones. But mutation never gave gilled people their chance as far as we know, and the kinds of catastrophes, diseases and mating failures which humans faced at large fall within certain bounds. In this sense, I can see how "natural selection is severely limited both in its power to promote useful genes and in its freedom to tinker with morphology."
So, there may be some legitimate questions there: Is mutation really random? If not, what is its direction and how is it passed on to the descendants? Does this alleged direction work even without any evolutionary selection pressures, or is it an illusion caused by the fact that the evolutionary pressures which humans had to face were more or less the same everywhere? Is this view supported by good evidence showing that the "proper" evolutionary view is inadequate?
[Blunderov]
It is not clear to me why these two ideas, dramatic genetic mutation and Autocatalysis, should be mutually exclusive as the article seems to imply. "If natural selection is not the be all and end all of evolution, then what is?" smacks suspiciously to me of a false dilemma; could it not be some of both at different times and places for instance?
Maybe this why the models don't hold up?
It seems to me that the writer has deliberately presented matters in a more adversarial light than might be completely warranted.
All that said, I quite like the idea of autocatalysis.
[rhinoceros]
I haven't read the book and I have just started to read on this subject. It is possible that these complexity theories will eventually provide us with a theory for the specific mechanisms of evolution or will make us change our view of some factors.
About the adversarial presentation... yes, that was the writer's intention. The reason becomes obvious when you read the whole review at http://www.skeptic.com/review12.html. Also notice the last sentence: "the battle for science will be determined in both the private and public spheres of influence"...
[Walter Watts]
These "feedback loops" sound surprisingly similar to Stuart Kauffman's "tiny attractors", don't you think?
[rhinoceros]
It is interesting that you mentioned that, Walter. I just found a paper containing a lot of references to Stuart Kaufman's work.
Complex Adaptive Systems
J. Stephen Lansing
http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lansing/CompAdSys.pdf
Abstract: The study of complex adaptive systems, a subset of nonlinear dynamical systems, has recently become a major focus of interdisciplinary research in the social and natural sciences. Nonlinear systems are ubiquitous; as mathematician Stanislaw Ulam observed, to speak of "nonlinear science" is like calling zoology the study of "nonelephant animals" (quoted in Campbell et al. 1985, p. 374). The initial phase of research on nonlinear systems focused on deterministic chaos, but more recent studies have investigated the properties of self-organizing systems or anti-chaos. For mathematicians and physicists, the biggest surprise is that complexity lurks within extremely simple systems. For biologists, it is the idea that natural selection is not the sole source of order in the biological world. In the social sciences, it is suggested that emergencethe idea that complex global patterns with new properties can emerge from local interactionscould have a comparable impact.
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