So the second reply to NST: > On Mar 30, 2026, at 19:34, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: > > DES et al., > > I don't understand how we can have a conversation about evolution without > engaging the problem of design. Darwin's theory was an attempt to explain > design without reference to a designer; natural selection was that > explanation. Unless I'm out of my mind—which of course is a > possibility—population biology does not address that problem at all.
This is a change of subject from the earlier protest email that I just replied to, about what is or isn’t a tautology, but as long as we acknowledge that, I am happy to shift with it. I don’t find myself ever using the term “design”, and — although I did criticize it off-hand yesterday — I had to reflect a moment about why. I suspect that, if I spent a lot of time thinking about it, I would decide I really can’t stand the term (for this context), and would more-actively refuse to use it, protected by an automatic pain-reflex. Specifically, the pain of cognitive Bad Faith, as Glen uses the term and as I would use it too. The reason is that it is the worst of all worlds: its overwhelming semantic content is prejudice: the metaphorical imposition of human intention, while the aspect of it that could ever be unpacked into something systematic is so weak and arbitrary that it is a good model for horoscope language. It _invites_ conversations like Pangloss’s, in which whatever happens is glossed ex post to be the Best of All Possible Worlds. Again, remember the Vampires: don’t complain to me that they do things you dislike, if you are the one who invited them in. (Now, here, I do want to acknowledge the earlier sub-thread that JonZ has immortalized: if we were teleported back into the God-suffused world that Darwin inhabited, maybe we would be granted no other terms for discourse, and would then have to suffer whatever fate befell us. But let me not suppose that world here, because for today we haven’t yet been pushed back down into it.) There is very much a word I would like to use probably-everywhere you want the vampire-word of “design”, and if we were in physics or engineering, I could use it that way. It is the word “function”. It is unfortunate that, in evolution-leaning biology (and thus bled into the rest of biology), the word “function” was captured early-on by the theologians, and imprinted with almost all the same prejudicial metaphor as “design”. And it turns out that no matter how long you tell biologists that you want to use the term in its physics/engineering meaning, they will simply refuse to hear you, continue to hear you as meaning their usage, and then complain that whatever you said doesn’t parse. I don’t know what to do about that. So I am going to use it in the physics/engineering sense here, and I guess damn the torpedos. (Is that what they say on ships? "I guess damn the torpedos"?) If I had to speak carefully about what “function” carries in physics or engineering, I would say it entails that we have agreed upon a system/environment decomposition, with the substitutability that multiple different systems could be embedded in the same environment, glued at (more-or-less, closely-enough) the same interfaces. A “function” performed by the system is then some kind of change delivered through the system/environment interface, which can be defined from what is done at the interface or in the environment, independently of the specific identification of the system doing it. (There is a math of conditional independence, yada yada yada; you know it and the list always discusses it; Markov Blankets and other stuff I don’t even know the definitions of; let me not go off down that track here.) (For example, obviously not meant to be inclusive: “The chemical conversion X -> Y is a function that can be performed by many different reaction networks.") My aim (at whatever level of semantic tedium is needed to carry it through) is that sentences such as “different systems can perform the same function” are meaningful and sensible. I don’t regard this as any real problem, beyond ad hoc work setting up terms for description and discourse. Anyway — god it’s all tiresome — when we are talking about “functions”, there are all sorts of questions of criterion that are _easy_ to make operational and concrete. Performing a chemical conversion. Absorbing light energy to produce a charge separation. Making convex poly-glycine bodies that focus light as converging lenses. Making electrochemically-active membrane systems that induce waves from receptors for charge separations. Realizing a kind of system-catalytic control architecture that inputs polynucleotides as templates, and generates polypeptides as products, thus admitting lots of control-theoretic and information-theoretic markings that we formalize in the Central Dogma. And so forth. Each of these functions is a describable capability in the physical world. We can then ask other sensible (if often rather difficult) questions about: How rare are systems with that capability? How “hard” are they to discover (making use of computer-science formalisms to try to capture “hardness”, and requiring us to declare null models to define “discovery” as an absorption phenomenon of stochastic motion in combinatorial spaces). And on and on. Then, a whole world of questions opens up to us in an entirely non-confusing form, as far as I can tell: Given two premises: 1) things fall apart (which again we can make operational at the cost of tedium); and 2) in temporally-extended processes, amplification and attenuation (the latter both from merely falling apart, and from more active processes) become available in certain kinds of systems (which must have memory, yada yada yada…) will this-or-that particular model of a heredity-and-selection dynamic give a defensible account of the discovery of some system performing the function in question? Will it do the more stringent job of accounting for the presence of _this observed_ system among the alternatives that perform the same function? And so forth. > Mathematics often has a kind of predictive power: working out the > implications of a theory in mathematical form can lead you to places you did > not anticipate. In my geriatric bewilderment, this is what I think population > biology does. I still don't think it has much to say about design, nor has > there been much attempt to explore the distribution of design in nature. On > the whole, there is not as much of it as people have been led to think. But > sometimes natural selection seems to do a very good job, as shown by > comparisons between natural objects and engineered ones. Is it in Job that one finds “Why dost thou kick against the pricks?” If you want God-or-man intentional metaphors, and you want to rail against God-or-man metaphors, I can’t help you. These are your own demons. I can try to make the case that there are worlds not inhabited by these demons, which are not deficient thereby. You absolutely are right that population genetics is a weak domain for causal inference. This is the kind of thing that Mike Lynch’s papers like to simply elide, while he goes to beat up somebody else he has decided he doesn’t like (or more likely in my view, has just decided he has the perch to dominate). There are interesting things to say about why population-genetic model-selection is a weak domain for causal inference, having to do with sample power in relation to question classes, etc. Lots can be said, and if one has time to engage it, I think a lot of it is interesting. The way Machine Learning models work is going to give us a lot of lived experience to make the strengths and limitations of these filtering-dynamic processes, and the statistical inference over them, familiar and ultimately intuitive. I would claim that nobody reasonable is claiming that popgen model identification is all we have to define or identify causation, or that it would be sufficient if it were all we had. We do all the rest of science too, and various parts pitch in various insights. (Yes, _that_ was a tautology. Anybody who did claim it, I would call unreasonable. Obviously the non-tautological insinuation is that the “reasonable” set contains most of the biologists.) This was my point, in the previous post, that popgen doesn’t cook your dinner and do the dishes afterward. Those tasks get done too; they just get done through other agencies. > There has been a great deal of work along the lines of: “Oh wow, this thing > in nature is designed just as well as something we might have designed > ourselves. Holy cow, isn't that wonderful? Isn't natural selection grand?” > But sometimes these effects are not produced by natural selection—or at least > not entirely. If we decide we want to pursue these questions seriously, beyond just a kind of idle emotion-stroking, there is plenty here that can become interesting too: _Why_do we find some human-design project harder or easier, more noteworthy or not? Look up the work on what makes combinatorial games interesting to play, as cultures have evolved them over centuries. The Mathematical Games crew at Berkeley MSRI wrote lovely stuff on this for many years. When is a design problem for us, as future-and-counterfactual model-makers and model-scanners, similar in kind to a discovery problem accomplished in some non-human system? When are we recapitulating the non-human system because certain forms of the problem are most-accessible? When is discovery for us meaningfully-enough different from that available to a non-human, or a non-cognitive, process, to motivate characterizing the difference? There is _so_ much to do. Eric .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. 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