[FRIAM] Natural Design as a primitive property (was FRIAM and Causality)

[Robert Cordingley]

Quick thought.  Isn't 'designedness' directly proportional to a local 
reduction in entropy (= a measure of disorder, etc.) ?  There's lots of 
math on entropy.
Robert C

Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> All, 
>
> I confess I have not followed the mathematical side of this discussion into
> the blue underlined stuff.  Nor do I claim to understand all of the plain
> text. 
>
> However, I am tempted by the idea of a mathematical formalization of
> "natural design".  Here is the argument:  What EVERYBODY --from the most
> dyed in the wool Natural Theologist to the most flaming Dawkinsian -- 
> agrees on is that there is some property of natural objects which we might
> roughly call their designedness.  Tremendous confusion has been sewn by
> biologists by confusing that property -- whatever it might be --  with the
> CAUSES of that property, variously God or Natural selection, or
> what-have-you.   So much of what passes for causal explanation in biology
> is actually description of the "adaptation relation" or what I call, just
> to be a trouble-maker, "natural design".  
>
> It seems to me that you mathematicians could do a great deal for biology by
> putting your minds to a formalization of "natural design".  It would put
> Darwin's theory -- "natural selection begets natural design" out of the
> reach of tautology once and for all.  What I am looking for here is a
> mathematical formalization of the relations --hierarchy of relations, I
> would suppose -- that leads to attributions of "designedness".  Assuming
> that one had put a computer on a British Survey Vessel and sent it round
> the world for five years looking at the creatures and their surroundings,
> what is the mathematical description of the relation that would have to be
> obtained before the computer would come home saying that creatures were
> designed (and rocks weren't).   Then -- and only then -- are we in a
> position to ask the question, "is natural selection the best explanation
> for this property.  
>
> My supposition is that ALL current theories will not survive such an
> analysis.  Indeed, we may need a new metaphor altogether.  Many of you will
> be familiar with the notion of fitness landscape.  For intuitive purposes,
> let me turn the landscape upside down, so its peaks are chasms and its
> valleys are peaks.  Now, drop a ball at random into the upside down
> landscape.  Assuming that the landscape is rigid, the ball will roll around
> until it finds a local minimum.  If you put some jitter in the rolling, it
> might, depending on the size of the jitter and the roughness of the
> landscape, find the absolute minimum.  But all of this assumes that the
> ball has no effect on the landscape!  If we turn the landscape into a
> semi-rigid net so that the ball deforms the landscape as it rolls through
> it, then we have a much better metaphor for the relation between an
> organism's design and the environment in which it is operating.  Some
> organisms -- weedy species -- cause the environment to rise under their
> feet, so to speak, so they are constantly driven out of whatever valley
> they settle in;  Other organisms modify the environment in their favor and
> in effect, dig their way into a pit in the landscape.  If the ball
> representing such organisms has inadequate jitter or the landscape is not
> sufficiently springy, such an organism can dig its way  into a pit and then
> go extinct.  
>
> In short we need a dynamical theory.  But such a theory will never happen
> until we have a  sufficiently subtle (and verbalizable) mathematical
> formalization of the momentary relation between organisms and their 
> environments that we are trying to explain.   Get at it, you
> mathematicians!!!!
>
> Nick 
>   
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