[FRIAM] semi-idle question

Wed Apr 28 14:41:43 EDT 2021

Ok, glen.  First, stop with the cap-doffing!  It invokes a standard of “qualification” that I’m pretty sure you don’t believe itn.  Anyway, if you aren't qualified to have this conversation than nobody is, and I am not prepared to accept that obvious truth.  The ONLY  question here is whether we can all get somewhere new by sharing what we do know ... or think we know.  Grrrr!

tNatural selection is a metaphor from barnyard selection to "selection" in the wild.  It requires individual inheritance.  If you have a herd or a flock or some sort, and it if the members of that flock vary in that respect, and if the offspring of the parent generation are more likely to resemble their own parents than they are other individuals in the flock, then you have inheritance.  The fact of inheritance is agnostic with respect it's mechanism.  It can be by dna or it can be by stygmergy or it can be by learning.  All are equally suitable for natural selection's purposes (joke!). 

Cultural inheritance  is the transmission of one (emergent) property of a group of people to the next generation of that group of people.  If you have a population of cultures, then a trait could be said to be inherited if successive generations of the same cultures were more similar in these emergent traits than  successive generations of different cultures.  The presence of cultural inheritance is agnostic with respect to mechanism.  

I suppose there must be cultural selection, but it is a dubious notion because it so often is exploited in the regulation of individual selection.

To me, selection, of any kind is an achievement.  Given all the legion of events that take place between one generation of individuals or of cultures, for selection to have a "clear shot" at any one trait seems profoundly mysterious to me.  To put Steve Guerin's question in my own terms, what interest, if any, has guided us to the possibility of selection?  Unlike SG, I am not tempted to attach that "interest" to any theological system. 

Back to packing. 

Nick 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2021 9:59 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

Of course. ... 

I realize I'm making a nonstandard argument. Often I regret trying to push the envelope like this because then I have to spend time trying to explain what I think, to little avail, probably because my thinking is sloppy. I don't know why I keep doing it ... too few nights at the pub, I suspect.

This entry in SEP confirms my argument is nonstandard, or not even wrong:

 <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/#NatSelCulInh> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/#NatSelCulInh

There's this juxtaposition between biological evolution and cultural evolution that seems to work well for those of you who know what you're talking about. For me, though, the separation between cultural inheritance and natural selection seems incoherent. It's part of why the Kirkley paper's formulation of a neighborhood caught my eye. And why Frank's "inverted" correlation between collider inputs was interesting.

Even if bioEvo were purely "vertical", it's difficult for me to think a function's arity (or ploidy) is crucial to the conception of the function, at least not extensionally. I can see, for example, how point mutation might [⛧] not allow monoploidic inheritance to simulate diploidic inheritance. But combine (perhaps a recursive sequence of) non-point mutations with monoploidal inheritance and it seems like you could effectively simulate *-ploidy, in the same vein as EricS brought up function currying awhile back.

And if you allow for N-ary/N-ploidy inheritance in bioEvo, why isn't "oblique transmission" (e.g. retroviruses) part of natural selection? And if it is, even if only in some tiny/rare/persnickety biological relations, why not at least consider that natural selection operates over culture as well as bio?

IDK. I feel like a crank, like those 't Hooft generously describes as "amateurs" here:

 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03179v1> https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03179v1

"To many of my readers (the ones who may still be with me), what I just said sounds very much like letters we receive in our daily mail from amateur physicists. They are amateurs because they usually exhibit a dismal lack of knowledge and understanding of modern science. Like many of my colleagues, I quickly discard such letters, but some- times they are fun to read. More to the point, by not knowing how our world has been found to hang together, they could have bounced into some more independent ways of asking questions."

You should definitely *discard* what this ... [ahem] amateur says. Luckily, I only pass rule #5:

"5. He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined...."  <http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/> http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

I'm admittedly not a genius. If there's an ignorant blockhead here, it's me. Nobody persecutes me ... in fact, I'm surprised how generous y'all are in listening to my nonsense. And I'll attack anyone, regardless of their status. 8^D

[⛧] But, even then, the inheritance function would have 2 inputs, the genome and where/how to do the mutation. So, again extensionally, that function looks a lot like diploid inheritance.

On 4/27/21 9:53 PM,  <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:

> Glen,

> 

> In my limited experience, people who invoke the beaver do so to limit the reach of natural selection, not to enhance it. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nick Thompson

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

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

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam < <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???

> Sent: Monday, April 26, 2021 12:33 PM

> To:  <mailto:friam at redfish.com> friam at redfish.com

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

> 

> IDK. This thread seems polluted with some sort of arrogant premise that "natural selection" doesn't include cultural selection *or* engineering. The "natural" in natural selection doesn't mean the same thing it means when you see it on a green-washed plastic package in the grocery store or at your favorite pseudoscience driven website. It means something larger, more diffuse. 

> 

> If we can say that beavers *engineer* their dams, and yet that engineering (and the "culture" in which it sits) falls under "natural selection", then any engineering projects we humans engage in will also fall under "natural selection", including CRISPR and the terraforming of Mars. This assumption of a crisp distinction between culture and genetics seems false to my ignorant eye, especially given layers like epigenetics and anthropogenic unintended, but global, feedback.

> 

> Darwinism, without the "neo" genetic mechanism, may allow for us to broaden the *generator* beyond DNA. But that doesn't imply that the evolution isn't "natural". The focus on how many children one sires seems quaint, provincial.

> 

> On 4/25/21 9:51 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

>> 

>> On 4/25/21 10:47 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

>>> 

>>> Pieter said:

>>> 

>>>> /"Humans will no longer evolve."/

>>>> 

>>>> I agree humans will no longer evolve by natural selection. Not that I'm predicting anything, but how can anybody say with any kind of confidence that humans will not evolve by gene editing in the future?

>> 

>> And to try to be fair to your point, I think if we replace "evolve" with "adapt" the quibbles diminish to nil.

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