[FRIAM] towards a description of a goal-function relation

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Jon,

 

Tomorrow I have to clarify the goal, selection, function, that-for-which-designed muddle I have created.  Over the 40 years I wrote about this, I slightly changed my tune, and it’s no fair to you to have you working at this if I don’t have my own language straight.  In the meantime, I attach, in case you have not seen it before, the first paper in which I laid it out, which has myriad examples of the distinction, set forth in a very condensed format.  

 

Thanks for helping me think about this.  

 

Bed, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 2020 10:10 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] towards a description of a goal-function relation

 

Thank you, Nick and Eric, for the corrections, direction, and help as I
grapple with these ideas that you both are so familiar with. Taking a
step back, it appears that evolutionary theorists identify function in
the epiphenomena arising from underlying mechanisms. What connection the
epiphenomena have to the mechanisms can often be elusive, illusory, and
hotly debated. Must the mechanisms related to a flowing river give rise
to a meaningful[Ȣ] function? Moreover and seemingly less to the point,
evolutionary functions are sought after that can be identified as being
preserved inter-generationally in some sense. The survival of gulls is
an unintended consequence of selection upon eggshell removal.

While goals are related to the satisfaction of the individual, the
function is not so simply defined. As Nick has pointed out many times in
our conversations, function may better be understood in relation to a
concept of design[‖]. Perhaps it would be better to imagine function as
needing to satisfy the specification of some design[※]. The styrofoam
herding robot knows nothing of styrofoam, the bent metal in my thermo-
stat knows nothing of comfort, the maple pod knows nothing of the
journey or what it means to be distributed evenly, and the gull makes
no connection between removing shells and predation. However the theory
is to account for function, it will need to be in a language capable of
describing side effects as first-class citizens.

Eric relates the discovery of a goal-function distinction in evolutionary
theory to the discovery of the surface tension-PH distinction in chemistry.
Whether intentionally identified or just a side effect of his argument,
surface tension and PH are decidedly examples of intensive quantities and
so are of a type best characterized by contravariant functors[⁂]. The
connections here to contravariant logical notions (pullbacks, sections,
equalizers, finite limits, etc...) may have very real manifestations wrt
how we must investigate such ideas empirically. Ideas like this are
hinted at in Lawvere's work, but also seem to trace back further to
thinkers like Clifford Truesdell and others that struggled with rational
thermodynamics. From what I gather from those works, there ought

to be a tight connection between the logic of a notion and the methods

we employ in coming to understand the notion.

To the extent that this much may be passable, I hope to find some time
this week to work through the possible connection to contravariant
functors, to reason further in analogy to free constructions, and extend
the analogy to exaptations and spandrels. Again, I invite additional
corrections, comments, and nuance.

 

Jon


[Ȣ] By meaningful I exactly mean non-arbitrary. I would say that notions
like energy and momentum are meaningful to the physicist, for instance,
not because they are arbitrary but because they have a privileged place
relative to the art and the artisans that work there. The scientific
enterprise is a meaning-making enterprise and to say that such-and-such
idea is meaningful to the artisan is to emphasize its value relative to the art.

[‖] In a parallel post, I attempt to spell out a mathematical construction
that I believe can be an example if not a template relating design,
epiphenomena, and higher-order structure in mathematics. That this
construction can alternatively be interpreted as a post hoc justification,
gives a limiting case for not needing a designer to have a design.

http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/How-is-a-vector-space-like-an-evolutionary-function-td7597965.html

[⁂] Footnoted again, but this time with an added emphasis on page 20:
https://altexploit.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/1992-categories-of-space-and-quantity.pdf
"By contrast, an intensive quantity-type is a contravariant functor,
taking coproducts to products, from a distributive category, but now a
functor whose values have a multiplicative structure as well as an
additive structure."

[※] To act as touchstones, I am adding this list of functions:
1. herd styrofoam (http://www.verena-hafner.de/teaching/didabots.pdf)
2. maintain a comfortable temperature in the house
3. spread seeds far and evenly
4. avoid predation

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