[FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

Wed Aug 9 17:01:04 EDT 2017

Some of us tend to care more about applied power more than the explanatory power.   Also as Frank suggested there are practical limits to the size of genomes that can be simulated.  I could imagine epigenetic / regulatory analogs being beneficial though.

Marcus

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 9, 2017, at 12:58 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net<mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>> wrote:

Steve,

What’s powerful about it?

What is presented to the world by the epigenetic system is not mutations but “hypotheses” about ways to live.  And presumably epigenetic systems are shaped by natural selection to produce  more or less plausible hypotheses.  The randomness is largely notional.   I still think you guys are more captured by your model of evolution than by the actual facts of it.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Jenny Quillien
Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 12:21 PM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

Totally agree.

Maybe a few of us can read the Wagener book (apparently he  shows up at the Santa Fe institute from time to time as an external something or other) and see what we can do with the ideas.  I'll be in Amsterdam but can follow  e-mail threads to skype.   Jenny

On 8/9/2017 10:01 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Jenny -

What a powerful quote:

Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them.
In my own maunderings about the (continued?) relevance of Free Markets and Capitalism, it has occurred to me that the value of said Free Markets may well be restricted to the "innovation phase" of development.  Once something becomes a (relative) commodity, it seems it might be counter-productive to continue the illusion of competitive development.  At best it is wasteful and even harmful, and at worst it leads to an elevation of "innovation" to marketing and salesmanship.  This is why we have so many near-identical products on the market being pushed on us through the hype of greed and fear when the "generic" or "store brand" version is equal or (even) superior (certainly in price, but also possibly in quality... lacking the colorants and odorants and other embellishments required to differentiate one product from the other?).

- Steve
On 8/9/17 8:56 AM, Jenny Quillien wrote:

An excellent foray into such a topic is Arrival of the Fittest: how nature innovates by Andreas Wagner.

From the Preface:  the power of natural selection is beyond dispute, but this power has limits. Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. And calling the change that creates them random is just another way of admitting our ignorance about it. Nature's any innovations- some uncannily perfect - call for natural principles that accelerate life's ability to innovate, its innovability.

Dave West turned me onto the book and has promised a discussion about how it is relevant to 'evolution' in software. It is certainly relevant to Nick's e-mail.

Jenny Quillien

On 8/9/2017 8:47 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
Hi everybody,

Thanks for your patience as I emerge (hopefully) from post-surgical fog.

I figured I best start my own thread rather than gum up yours.

First.  I had always supposed that a stochastic process was one whose value was determined by two factors, a random factor AND it’s last value.  So the next step in a random walk is “random” but the current value (it’s present position on a surface, say) is “the result of a stochastic process.”  From your responses, and from a short rummage in Wikipedia, I still can’t tell if I am correct or not.

Now remember, you guys, my standard critique of your discourse is that you confuse your models with the facts of nature.  What is this “evolution” of which you speak?  Unless you tell me otherwise, I will assume you are speaking of the messy biological process of which we are all a result: --  The alteration of the design of taxa over time.   Hard to see any way in which that actual process is evidently random.  We have to dig deep into the theory that EXPLAINS evolution to find anything that corresponds to the vernacular notion of randomness.  There is constraint and predictability all over the place in the evolution I know.  Even mutations are predictable.  In other words, the randomness of evolution is a creation of your imaginations concerning the phenomenon, not an essential feature of the phenomenon, itself.

So what kind of “evolution” are you guys talking about?

Yes, and forgive me for trolling, a bit.  I am trying to wake myself up, here.

nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>

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