Steve:
This is sort of fun: Which is more advanced; a horse's hoof or a human hand.? Answer: the hoof is way more advanced. (Actually I asked the question wrong, it should have been horses "forearm") Why? Because the word "advanced" means just "altered from the ancestral structure that gave rise to both the hoof and the hand." That ancestral structure was a hand-like paw, perhaps like that on a raccoon, only a few steps back from our own hand. The horse's hoof is a single hypertrophied fingernail on a hand where every other digit has shrunk to almost nothing. Many more steps away. Humans are in many ways very primitive creatures. Viruses are very advanced, having lost everything! Our Maker is given to irony. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2011 10:12 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What evolves? Dear old bald guy with big eyebrows (aka Nick).. I'm becoming an old bald guy myself with earlobes that are sagging and a nose that continues to grow despite the rest of his face not so much. I look forward to obtaining eyebrows even half as impressive as yours! Now *there* is some personal evolution! To use a particular vernacular, "You've got a nice rack there Nick!" I really appreciate your careful outline of this topic, it is one of the ones I'm most likely to get snagged on with folks who *do* want to use the world evolution (exclusively) to judge social or political (or personal) change they approve/disapprove of. I appreciate Victoria asking this question in this manner, it is problematic in many social circles to use Evolution in it's more strict sense. I have been trained not to apply a value judgment to evolution which of course obviates any use of it's presumed negative of devolution. At the same time, there are what appear to be "retrograde" arcs of evolution... biological evolution, by definition, is always adaptive to changing conditions which may lead one arc of evolution to be reversed in some sense. When pre-aquatic mammals who evolved into the cetaceans we know today (whales and dolphins) their walking/climbing/crawling/grasping appendages returned to functioning as swimming appendages. One might consider that a retrograde bit of evolution. That is not to say that being a land inhabitant is "higher" than a water inhabitant and that the cetaceans are in any way "less evolved" than their ancestors, they are simply evolved to fit more better into their new niche which selects for appendages for swimming over appendages for land locomotion. Nevertheless, is there not a measure of "progress" in the biosphere? Do we not see the increasing complexity (and heirarchies) of the biosphere to be somehow meaningful, positive, more robust? Would the replacement of the current diversity of species on the planet to a small number (humans, cows, chickens, corn, soybeans, cockroaches) be in some sense retrograde evolution in the biosphere? Or to a single one (humans with very clever nanotech replacing the biology of the planet)? In this description I think I'm using the verb evolve to apply to the object terran biosphere. Since I was first exposed to the notion of the co-evolution of species, I have a hard time thinking of the evolution of a single species independent of the biological niche it inhabits and shapes at the same time. In this context the only use of "devolve" or "retrograde evolution" I can imagine is linked to complexity again... a biological niche whose major elements die off completely somehow seems like a retrograde evolution... the pre-desert Sahara perhaps? The Interglacial tundras? The inland seas when they become too briny (and polluted) to support life? I know that all this even is somehow anthropocentric, so maybe I'm undermining my own position (that there might be a meaningful use of evolution/devolution). - Steve (primping the 3 wild hairs in his left eyebrow) Dear Victoria, The word "evolution" has a history before biologists made off with it, but I can't speak to those uses. I think it first came into use in biology to refer to development and referred to the unfolding of a flower. The one use I cannot tolerate gracefully is to refer to whatever social or political change the speaker happens to approve of. As in, "society is evolving." The term devolution comes out of that misappropriation. One of the properties that some people approve of is increasing hierarchical structure and predictable order. The development of the British empire would have been, to those people, a case of evolution. Thus, when parliaments were formed and government functions taken over by Northern Ireland and Scotland, this was called Devolution. Perhaps most important in any discussion along these lines is to recognize that the use of the term, "evolution", implies a values stance of some sort and that we should NOT take for granted that we all share the same values, if we hope to have a "highly evolved" discussion (};-])* Nick Thompson *-old bald guy with big eyebrows and a wry smirk on his face. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://www.cusf.org <http://www.cusf.org/> From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Victoria Hughes Sent: Monday, May 09, 2011 8:26 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What evolves? A couple of other questions then: What is devolution? Is that a legitimate word in this discussion, if not why not, etc and Does evolution really just mean change, and if so why is there a different word for it? ie: If evolution means 'positive sustainable change' who is deciding what is positive and sustainable? One could argue that aspects of human neurological evolution have 'evolved' a less-sustainable organism, or at least a very problematic or flawed design. The internal conflicts between different areas of the brain, often in direct opposition to each other and leading to personal and large-scale destruction: is that evolution? if so why, etc Just because we can find out where in our genes this is written, does that mean it is good? There is often a confusion between description and purpose. I'd vote for option C, in Eric's paragraph below: ultimately it must be "the organism-environment system evolves" or there is an upper limit to the life-span of a particular trait. Holism is the only perspective that holds up in the long term. This is another one of those FRIAM chats that brush against the intangible. We sure do sort by population here, and we evolve into something new in doing this. I am changed for the better by reading and occasionally chiming in, sharpening my vocabulary and writing skills in this brilliant and eclectic context. I determined evolution there. Does a radish get the same thrill? Oh, my taxa are so flexed I have to send this off. Thanks for the great phrase, NIck- Victoria On May 9, 2011, at 5:41 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote: Russ, Good questions. I'm hoping Nick will speak up, but I'll hand wave a little, and get more specific if he does not. This is one of the points by which a whole host of conceptual confusions enter the discussion of evolutionary theory. Often people do not quite know what they are asserting, or at least they do not know the implications of what they are asserting. The three most common options are that "the species evolves", "the trait evolves", or "the genes evolve". A less common, but increasingly popular option is that "the organism-environment system evolves". Over the course of the 20th century, people increasingly thought it was "the genes", with Williams solidifying the notion in the 50s and 60s, and Dawkins taking it to its logical extreme in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins (now the face of overly-abrasive-atheism) gives you great quotes like "An chicken is just an egg's way of making more eggs." Alas, this introduces all sorts of devious problems. I would argue that it makes more sense to say that species evolve. If you don't like that, you are best going with the multi-level selection people and saying that the systems evolve. The latter is certainly accurate, but thinking in that way makes it hard to say somethings you'd think a theory of evolution would let you say. Eric On Mon, May 9, 2011 06:25 PM, Russ Abbott <russ.abb...@gmail.com> wrote: I'm hoping you will help me think through this apparently simple question. When we use the term evolution, we have something in mind that we all seem to understand. But I'd like to ask this question: what is it that evolves? We generally mean more by evolution than just that change occurs--although that is one of the looser meaning of the term. We normally think in terms of a thing, perhaps abstract, e.g,. a species, that evolves. Of course that's not quite right since evolution also involves the creation of new species. Besides, the very notion of species is controversial <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/> . (But that's a different discussion.) Is it appropriate to say that there is generally a thing, an entity, that evolves? The question is not just limited to biological evolution. I'm willing to consider broader answers. But in any context, is it reasonable to expect that the sentence "X evolves" will generally have a reasonably clear referent for its subject? An alternative is to say that what we mean by "X evolves" is really "evolution occurs." Does that help? It's not clear to me that it does since the question then becomes what do we means by "evolution occurs" other than that change happens. Evolution is (intuitively) a specific kind of change. But can we characterize it more clearly? I'm copying Nick and Eric explicitly because I'm especially interested in what biologists have to say about this. -- Russ Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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