[FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

Tue Aug 22 19:05:36 EDT 2017

Nick,

"Natural selection can /preserve/ innovations, but it cannot create them."  and
 "The idea of evolution groping blindly through morphology space is absurd."

Not trying to get into a tussle with you, 😊 but Jeremy England
<http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/england_jeremy.html> would tend
to agree with you, as would I.  According to this analysis (*Nautilus *2016)
concerning the Hox gene circuit
<http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution-rp>,
there doesn't seem to be enough time for randomness (i.e., blindly groping)
to be explanatory. The numbers tend to say this *would *be absurd.

Take, for example, the discovery within the field of evolutionary
> developmental biology that the different body plans of many complex
> organisms, including us, arise not from different genes but from different
> networks of gene interaction and expression in the same basic circuit,
> called the Hox gene circuit. To get from a snake to a human, you don’t
> need a bunch of completely different genes, but just a different pattern of
> wiring in essentially the same kind of Hox gene circuit. For these two
> vertebrates there are around 40 genes in the circuit. If you take account
> of the different ways that these genes might regulate one another (for
> example, by activation or suppression), you find that the number of
> possible circuits is more than 10700. That’s a lot, lot more than the
> number of fundamental particles in the observable universe. What, then, are
> the chances of evolution finding its way blindly to the viable “snake” or
> “human” traits (or phenotypes) for the Hox gene circuit? How on earth did
> evolution manage to rewire the Hox network of a Cambrian fish to create us?

...

You could go from one sequence to another with the same shape (and thus
> much the same function) via a succession of small changes to the sequence,
> as if proceeding through a rail network station by station. Such changes
> are called neutral mutations, because they are neither adaptively
> beneficial nor detrimental. (In fact even if mutations are not strictly
> neutral but slightly decrease fitness, as many do, they can persist for a
> long time in a population as if they were quasi-neutral.)

Here is a new explanation *for the rest of us* -- *Wired*: CONTROVERSIAL
NEW THEORY SUGGESTS LIFE WASN'T A FLUKE OF BIOLOGY—IT WAS PHYSICS
<https://www.wired.com/story/controversial-new-theory-suggests-life-wasnt-a-fluke-of-biologyit-was-physics/>
[7-30-2017].

... and here -- *Scientific America*: A New Physics Theory of Life
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/>
[2014], where the same science author writes about this when the idea was
first proposed by England in his 2013 paper
<http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/2013jcpsrep.pdf>.

A physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the
law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire life-like physical
properties

Perhaps very much prematurely, England is being touted as the new Darwin.
His theory, however, does not replace natural selection but provides a
deeper expanation for "fitness."

In an hour-long lecture that I listened to
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91D5UAz-f4> recently, England admits that
we cannot really attribute any of this to randomness ... we don't really
know precisely what that is. What it seems to come down to, though, are--as
you say--the "best" hypotheses for the seemingly improbable (considering
the Second Law of Thermodynamics) building of new structures in a
prevailing heat bath that dissipate the most Gibbs free energy. Erwin
Schrödinger noted something similar in his 1944 essay *What is Life*.

If I understand this, what creates these "fit" structures is this
tendency for all matter, not just living matter, (i.e., arrangements of
atoms or molecules) to self-organize into new organizations--your
*hypotheses*--that maximize the dissipation of free energy. It is indeed
the evolving, prevailing environment that provides the opportunities for
various, different "hypotheses" to arise at different times in geological
history. So, in a sense, you *can *say that natural selection *creates and
preserves* innovations if you see it as an interactive process as both
Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead both did at the beginning of the
twentieth century.

>From the same *Scientific American* article, this is notable:

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give
> researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and
> function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection
> doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at
> Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable
> change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in
> the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has
> recently studied.

>
> If [*Jeremy*] England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could
> further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every
> adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of
> dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the
> reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be
> because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it
> easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

For students and practitioners of complexity science, this seems more than
just interesting.

Hope this adds something to this interesting thread.  It got my attention.

Cheers,

Robert

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 12:21 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> Wagner seems to support utterly my intuition that what the genome offers
> up is not random mutations but hypotheses for good living.  The idea of
> evolution groping blindly through morphology space is absurd.
>
> "inadequate," my tush.  (};-)]
>
> N
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of g???
> Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2017 12:11 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate
>
>
> Well, Dave promised to give us a gist of Wagner.  And Grant has chimed in
> regarding the stochasticity of crossover, which provoked an inadequate
> response from Nick, if I remember correctly.  Since you're actively reading
> Wagner now, Nick, perhaps you could give us a summary of what he might have
> meant by Jenny's quote?  Repeated here for convenience:
>
> 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.
> >
>
>
>
>
> On 08/22/2017 08:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> > I have been trying to get somebody to tussle with me over this claim
> since it was first made.
> > I think it’s nonsense, but I am not sure.
> >
> > *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Eric
> > Charles
> > *Sent:* Monday, August 21, 2017 8:11 PM
> > *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> > <friam at redfish.com>
> > *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate
> >
> >
> >
> > Sorry to pull at a still thread, but I find this claim fascinating.
> > "Natural selection can /preserve/ innovations, but it cannot create
> them."
> >
> > Would we say the same of artificial selection? I'm pretty sure we
> > would normally claim that artificial selection has lead to all sorts
> > of innovations. Maybe I'm thinking of "innovations" more broadly than
> > is intended?!? Aren't the baring and tail-wagging, multi-colored,
> > short-snouted, cuddly foxes an example of innovation? (For those who
> > don't know, it takes a pretty short number of generations to turn wild
> > foxes into reasonable approximations of domestic dogs, and all you
> > have to do is select against aggression towards humans.)
> >
> > I know what the quote is trying to get at, but I'm not sure it holds up
> in the wider context of things-that-cause biological innovation.
>
> --
> gⅼеɳ
>
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