Phil,
I am so hot on Plausibility of Life that I bought 4 cc to circulate here
amongst the SAF folks. So I wont hear a WORD against it. NOT A SINGLE
WORD.
I would mount a stalwart defense of it, except that my copy is buried at
the bottom of one of three HUGE book boxes I sent from the east that I have
not the courage (nor book cases to open). Nonetheless, I will offer the
following.
I thought their point was exactly that evolution was not directed but that
it was predicated; i.e., highly circumscribed by that which has gone
before. Strings of nucleotides and the cascades of enzyme events that they
facilitate get built in over time. They become, in the jargon of the book,
highly conserved. The interrelations between these sequence are governed
by "weak linkages", so it is possible for a environmental event or a
genetic event or a hormonal event to turn on and off whole functionally
organized cascades of developmental events (OH, THOMPSON, BLAH, BLAH,
BLAH).
OK, start again. Think about how a kid learns to ride a bicycle. She
already has several highly conserved core processes available to her ....
balance, cornering, looming of objects when going forward, features of the
pedaling motion which are similar to running, etc. The physics of the
situation also provide many Constance as say, the relation between the tilt
of the bike and the tendency of the handlebars to flop to the right or
left. (somebody PLEASE explain to me about angular momentum using very
small words!). The kid struggles to assemble the core processes in such a
way that the bike doesn't fall over. Given the goal of moving forward and
not falling down, the physics constrains this assemblage to certain
combinations.... (when you start to feel the bike tilt to the right, turn
your handle bars to the right. So eventually, the whole mess gets put
together in a functional passage.
But was there ever A HABIT of riding a bike (analogous to a gene for ....).
No, the constraints that make it possible are everywhere in the organism
and in the environment.
In the metaphor above read "falling off the bike" as "death". So the
organism can have the dual benefits of a tool box of developmental "tools"
that remain constant and the flexibility in the face variable environments.
So it's NOT directed evolution. its facilitated evolution.
I am, by the way,VERY familiar with the feeling that comes when some
highly funded Harvard guy gets a book out of something that one has been
struggling with for years. It's bitter sweet. Bad side: They got the
word out, not me! Good side Hooray, the word is finally out!!!! I guess
the truth is that we all do our little parts in making the zeitgeist
happen. It is characteristic of places like Harvard that they eat the cake
that others have been patiently baking, But would any of us really be
happy at such a place??? I don't think so. Harvard would say that they
advance the cause of thought by bringing the Good People together where
they can do the Best Work. (cf SFI). We dont know, however, what damage is
done to the local structures of intellectual development when the "good"
people are torn from them. It's like rats eating dodo eggs. It makes for
larger and better rats.
Nick
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 10:55:50 -0500
> From: "phil henshaw" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: [FRIAM] The Plausibility of Life('s confusing arguments)
> To: "'FRIAM'" <[email protected]>
> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> I read several of the key arguments in Kirschner & Gerhart's book and
> found both more key confusions to match the tortured syntax of his
> title, and a silver lining. On page 12, for example, if you discard
> the social politics and just parse the reasoning, they clearly assert
> that if an explanation could possibly be correct in any one case it must
> therefore be true in all cases. It's not that I don't agree with the
> politics, it's that it's bad science.
>
> Then in chapter seven, though, they clearly construct a mode of positive
> feedback for evolutionary directed variation. This is the second such
> proposal I now know of, in addition to my own, and that would indeed
> explain a whole lot that Darwinian style random variation leaves blank.
> In 1978 I called it "The Unhidden Pattern Of Events" (and I've been
> exploring the possibilities for communicating it ever since!) They
> propose that the "conserved processes","'during embryonic development"
> provide a core of "robustness" because "physiological adaptability
> suppresses lethality" so that variation at that stage is less
> destructive than creative.
>
> Their model may seem stated rather vaguely, but these things can take
> several tries. Still it's quite similar in form and intent to my
> latest proposal that genetic feedback would be the natural result of
> selection applied to changes in a core & branch developmental structure,
> allowing the tips of the organizational branches to 'explore' their
> local peaks and valleys of new possibility. The other one I know of
> taking this line is Peter Allen's model of change in socio-economic
> systems (ECO 11/2/06) in which he also explains variation as directing a
> core system to "explore" local pathways of possibilities. The common
> link is that they all describe somewhat plausible ways in which the
> variation would be at a developmental fringe of organization and
> excluded from a core of resolved and stable structure. That's part of
> what I'd like to publish in my plankton paper anyway, if anyone would
> let a very well constructed independent perspective get through the
> door.
>
> Some might wonder why there's a struggle to find better ways to explain
> something that's supposed to have already been explained. The problem
> with Darwin is the certainty that all evolution occurs by only one
> unsatisfactory means. Directed selection by itself is unsatisfactory
> because it simply does not make new species. It makes all kinds of
> different breeds of any one species, like all the kinds of dogs that are
> still grey wolfs as a species, but they're not new species. New
> species are things that may come about by multiple means, but frequently
> by sudden appearances. For those you need a kind of incremental
> process that also produces a rapid and coordinated change of state, a
> dynamic process that begins and ends. Feedback systems, by combining
> directed variation with directed selection, do that handily. I really
> wish I could find a journal competent in discussing the data of
> speciation that doesn't abhor the idea that it might involve a transient
> process!
>
>
> Phil Henshaw ????.?? ? `?.????
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 680 Ft. Washington Ave
> NY NY 10040
> tel: 212-795-4844
> e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>
>
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