Jenny -
What a powerful quote:
/Natural selection can //preserve//innovations, but it cannot create
them./
In my own maunderings about the (continued?) relevance of Free Markets
and Capitalism, it has occurred to me that the value of said Free
Markets may well be restricted to the "innovation phase" of
development. Once something becomes a (relative) commodity, it seems it
might be counter-productive to continue the illusion of competitive
development. At best it is wasteful and even harmful, and at worst it
leads to an elevation of "innovation" to marketing and salesmanship.
This is why we have so many near-identical products on the market being
pushed on us through the hype of greed and fear when the "generic" or
"store brand" version is equal or (even) superior (certainly in price,
but also possibly in quality... lacking the colorants and odorants and
other embellishments required to differentiate one product from the other?).
- Steve
On 8/9/17 8:56 AM, Jenny Quillien wrote:
An excellent foray into such a topic is /Arrival of the Fittest: how
nature innovates/ by Andreas Wagner.
From the Preface: the power of natural selection is beyond dispute,
but this power has limits. Natural selection can /preserve/
innovations, but it cannot create them. And calling the change that
creates them random is just another way of admitting our ignorance
about it. Nature's any innovations- some uncannily perfect - call for
natural principles that accelerate life's ability to innovate, its
innovability.
Dave West turned me onto the book and has promised a discussion about
how it is relevant to 'evolution' in software. It is certainly
relevant to Nick's e-mail.
Jenny Quillien
On 8/9/2017 8:47 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
Hi everybody,
Thanks for your patience as I emerge (hopefully) from post-surgical fog.
I figured I best start my own thread rather than gum up yours.
First. I had always supposed that a stochastic process was one whose
value was determined by two factors, a random factor AND it’s last
value. So the next step in a random walk is “random” but the current
value (it’s present position on a surface, say) is “the result of a
stochastic process.” From your responses, and from a short rummage
in Wikipedia, I still can’t tell if I am correct or not.
Now remember, you guys, my standard critique of your discourse is
that you confuse your models with the facts of nature. What is this
“evolution” of which you speak? Unless you tell me otherwise, I will
assume you are speaking of the messy biological process of which we
are all a result: -- */The alteration of the design of taxa over
time/*. Hard to see any way in which that actual process is
evidently random. We have to dig deep into the theory that EXPLAINS
evolution to find anything that corresponds to the vernacular notion
of randomness. There is constraint and predictability all over the
place in the evolution I know. Even mutations are predictable. In
other words, the randomness of evolution is a creation of your
imaginations concerning the phenomenon, not an essential feature of
the phenomenon, itself.
So what kind of “evolution” are you guys talking about?
Yes, and forgive me for trolling, a bit. I am trying to wake myself
up, here.
nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
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