On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 11:58:37AM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> Hi Alberto,
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Alberto G. Corona <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> > I think that there are real progress that can be even measured in terms of
>> > entropic order. That a man embodies more structure and organization than a
>> > bacteria is objective and measurable, and it is a product of more emergent
>> > levels of evolution. In concrete the human being includes the eucariotic
>> > level, the multicelularity level and human society level, that are
>> > aggregations of coordinated individuals to achieve an individuality of an
>> > higher level. These levels are absent in bacteria .
>>
>> Ok, there's an arrow of complexification, that's undeniable. I'm not
>> convinced that Darwinism alone explains that. One of the reasons for
>> my scepticism is the failure of ALife models to replicate unbounded
>> complexification. My favourite attempt in this domain is the Echo
>> model by John Holland -- which is beautiful but didn't work in this
>> sense. There's also Tierra/Avida, where you get a lot of interesting
>> stuff but no unbounded complexification.
>>
>> One idea I heard but don't know whom to attribute to is this:
>> evolutionary complexification is just an artefact of the simplicity of
>> the initial state. The idea being that the laws of physics inherently
>> contain a "pressure" towards a certain level of complexity and that
>> evolution is just following the path of least resitance, in a way. It
>> is then conceivable that there is a state of equilibrium that we
>> haven't reached yet and that complexification will halt at some point.
>> This is wild speculation, of course, but I like to ponder on this
>> hypothesis.
>>
>
> I think this idea goes by the name of "modal bacter". It was, perhaps, most
> forcefully argued in Stephen Gould's 1996 book "Full House".
Thanks Russell!
> I suspect the idea is wrong, because it fails to explain the
> exponential growth of diversity, seemingly observed by
> Palaeontologists such as Michael Benton:
>
> @Article{Benton01,
> author = {Michael J. Benton},
> title = {Biodiversity on Land and in the Sea},
> journal = {Geological Journal},
> year = 2001,
> volume = 36,
> pages = {211--230}
> }
Ok, but I guess that depends on how we measure diversity, which is not
a trivial matter. From a quick look at this paper, it seems to focus
on the number of biological orders/families/genus. Suppose we were
able to estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of the entire ecosystem, do
you figure it would also grow exponentially?
>> > What is not true is that human beings are more "adapted" than bacteria.
>> > That
>> > is not true. Because there is no objective and absolute measure of
>> > adaptation. It ever depends on the concrete environment, and varies a lot.
>>
>> Humm... I think ecologists are able to estimate the likelihood of a
>> species going extinct. I'd argue that this could be taken as a measure
>> of adaption.
>>
>
> That measure is called persistence, and no, it is not really related to
> adaption. For an adaption measure, one good possibility is Mark
> Bedau's "cumulative evolutionary activity"
>
> @InProceedings{Bedau-etal98,
> author = {Mark A. Bedau and Emile Snyder and Norman H. Packard},
> title = {A Classification of Long-Term Evolutionary Dynamics},
> crossref = {ALifeVI},
> pages={228--237}
> }
I read this paper some years ago, it's a very nice one.
I would say that cumulative evolutionary activity is a metric that
applies to the entire evolutionary system as a whole. The article
makes it depressingly clear the Holland's Echo does not match the
unbounded evolution dynamics found in the fossil record. But maybe I'm
missing something.
In the previous discussion I was arguing that persistence could be
intuitively taken as a fitness measure of some specific population or
species, and I still feel that's the case. If you want to estimate the
biological fitness of an individual, you could determine an analogous
probability of the individual producing x viable offsprings before
dying.
I think.
Telmo.
>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders
> Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected]
> University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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