[FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

Wed Aug 23 11:44:50 EDT 2017

Thanks, Robert,

These are nifty. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Robert Wall
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2017 7:06 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

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 ( <http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution-rp> Nautilus 2016) concerning the Hox gene circuit, 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." 

 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91D5UAz-f4> In an hour-long lecture that I listened to 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 <mailto: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 <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of g???
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2017 12:11 PM
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto: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 <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 <mailto: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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