Jenny mentioned Arrival of the Fittest. I will condense a set of notes that I am sending Jenny about the book and will post the condensed version to the list. I think it could resolve a lot of this 'random' issue. davew
On Fri, Aug 11, 2017, at 12:18 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Steve, > > Thanks for staying with me on this. > > To be honest, I have never encountered anybody who believed that > natural selection alone is capable of producing evolution, unless it > was somebody who includes some variation-generating mechanism within > the notion of natural selection. I have encountered people who think > that natural selection is not NECESSARY to evolution, attributing most > change to random walks of various sorts. I have never understood > those folks, but they have had their day.> > The heresy I am trying to expunge is that in which evolution is > understood as “a delta-q in the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium”, which > amounts to saying, natural selects whatever nature selects and > whatever nature selects is evolution. Darwin would have been baffled > by such a formulation.> > Nick > > Nicholas S. Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology > Clark University > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > *From:* Friam [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Steven > A Smith *Sent:* Friday, August 11, 2017 1:56 PM *To:* The Friday > Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> *Subject:* > Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate> > Nick - >> I am very glad to note that you are recovering and your scrappiness >> is properly returning!>> **[NST==>The best cardio rehab is for you-guys to >> keep annoying me. >> Thanks for that. <==nst]**> You might check with your cardiologist on this >> one, I'm not sure a > rise in BP is the same as exercise-stimulated increased heart rate, > but in any case, I'm glad we can be of service!>> >> What’s powerful about it? >> Nothing more than it is such a succinct statement negating the >> popular fallacious apprehension of the mechanism of evolution, >> suggesting that there is a causal link between "selection" and >> "innovation"... the innovation step is in the mutation, but as the >> quote states clearly, said *innovation* is *preserved* (selected for) >> by the natural selection mechanism.>> **[NST==>Wait a minute! What is the >> misapprehension of which you >> speak? Can you put it explicitly. **> The misapprehension of which I speak >> is that natural selection *alone* > gives rise to innovation. Without mutation, all that is achieved by > natural selection is a reduction of diversity in the > genotype/phenotype toward some "optimum" for the selection criteria, > or more likely a "wandering" around geno/pheno space as the selection > pressures "wander". I believe that this is the mechanism behind what > is known as "island dwarfism". There is no *innovation*, merely > selection for a feature within the phenotypic distribution (body size) > already in the population. > > I was NOT suggesting that YOU hold this misapprehension, just chiming > in on the point made by Jenny with her original quote.>> **And, when you say > that mutations are “random”, what precisely do >> you mean.**> I don't know that *I* have said that mutations are "random". >> I > agree that "random" is notional. But I think of a signal as being > "random" if the receiver has no model to correlate it's structure. A > highly organized but encrypted message is "random" if you don't have > the key to decode it. Cosmic radiation knocking holes in your genome > is "random" for all practical purposes, even if it is highly > correlated with solar and magnetosphere activity.>> ** Unpredictable? > Clearly false. We know quite a lot, I think, >> about where DNA is vulnerable, and where mutations are likely to >> occur. **> A "random" selection can still have a statistical distribution. >> When > rolling pairs of dice, there is only one way to get a value of 2, > (both dies == 1), 2 ways to get a value of 3 (1,2 and 2,1) and 3 ways > to get a value of 4 (1,3 and 3,1 and 2,2), etc. this distribution is > defined by simple combinatorics, but any given sample is still > "random". Referencing above, in principle every specific set of dice > are less than perfect and every dice-thrower might have some > "handedness" which *might* lend a tiny bias to the distribution (e.g. > LOADED dice). The resulting sequences are still random, just biased > in an unexpected way. Flipping a coin is the same (unless it is two- > headed of course!). > > I don't think that the DNA (or intermediate RNA?) is more vulnerable > in some regions (or among some sequences) than others to say, "cosmic > radiation" but I will accept that perhaps when the many potential > causes of mutation and the various mechanism for detection/repair are > taken into account, some parts of the sequence are more susceptible to > "effective" mutation? And of course, at the phenotypic level, what > is "effective" is what the natural selection component is all about. > > I will pause beating this horse for a moment but will try to respond > to the remainder of your response separately (perhaps even completing > the thought you thought I failed to complete?) > > - Steve> ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
