[FRIAM] Popper on Darwinism

Tue Dec 14 07:49:06 EST 2021

Yeah.

Apart from questions about what mechanisms exist and how they work, which I understand and are the normal business of science, I have never understood what all the squabbling is about.  The only outlines I can see that make a conversation with any coherence are fairly normal ones.  To wit:

If your model of the world entails the following premises:

0. There is enough regularity to anything that happens that there is a reason to give names to patterns (otherwise don’t talk)

1. Some of the patterns you see include “things’ falling apart”

2. The outcome-condition of this falling apart, to the extent that its patterns are stable for long enough times to result in any steady states, is what we call “equilibrium”

And if you observe that:

3. There are steady state patterns that differ from the equilibrium that would be produced by the falling-apart that you have recognized

4. And assuming we haven’t just mis-identified the pattern of falling apart, which would be a simple error of characterization 

Then the only class of explanations you have entail a description of dynamics that differs from the part accounting for your equilibrium in the features that 

5. There must be processes of (possibly structured) amplification at work in addition to the factors leading to your equilibrium account

6. There may be further processes of structured removal somehow linked to the amplification in ways that aren’t just the falling-apart you already identified. Either way, there must be additional structure in some combination between the amplification and the removal attached to it.

People like Michael Lachmann would argue that the above sequence is tantamount to evolution is as a causal account.  It is “entailed” by the premises, but that to me is not the same as saying it is “tautological”, because what is entailed is that there are features of the dynamics that change states through time that aren’t contained in the descriptions of states at times.  Nothing much different from what we have had in physics and engineering forever.

If you take the above organization of the argument as being non-problematic, then you have two things to do next, which are distinct from each other:

7. You need to get a clear set of characteristics as those by which you will _describe_ the structured amplification and pruning.  This is the program that, within population genetics as Fisher and then Price and Steve Frank set it up, involves defining what fitness is as a summary statistic, and deciding whether what you mean by “selection” is formalized only in terms of fitness or requires more.  You already know my argument that the population genetic program is limited but that it isn’t hard to expand beyond it while retaining the same logic.

8. You need a program of inference from the statistics you have taken to _chaaracterize, empirically_ the amplification and pruning, which are aspects of dynamics, to models of the aspects of things or organizations that predict or explain those dynamical regularities.  Or, in standard terms, you need a step of assigning causal models from states to the processes that change states.

All the chatter about “tautology” has never been comprehensible to me, because it seems to turn on a purposefully confused use of language, in which you conflate the ability to say what you are trying to explain, with the provision of a causal model that you call the explanation.  Then, having chosen to use the same word for two completely different meanings, wring hands and angst out that you have a profound philosophical difficulty.  For a long time I thought that smart people were somehow being subtle or profound in ways that I was just too dull to follow.  But I look at the rest of what they say, and it just looks like inability to think and speak in coherent categories, and I give up on them.

Nick’s point that industrial melanism might have been chemically induced is a great factoid to have.  My thanks for that; my life is now richer with things knowable about the world.  Doesn’t change any logic of the argument at all, in ways we have had the ability to think clearly about for at least a century (surely since D’Arcy Thompson).  It could be that there is no implicit model of environmental variability in the developmental capabilities of Haldane’s peppered moths, and that selection by differential predation on sooty English walls and birch trees prunes the population for congenitally dark moths.  Or it could be that sooty and white periods have a long history (gonna find who’s sooty and white), and that some phenotypic plasticity gets selected for over much longer times, which then gets canalized a la Waddington by being associated through selection with chemical signals during reproduction.  The availability of that plasticity would then produce dark moths in excess of (or instead of) the amount due to selective predation.  The logic of the 8-step sequence above is no different in the two cases; only the degree of developmental machinery at work, the timescales involved, the difficulty of the association problems among components of development, differ in one case from another.  So it’s a complex system with several mechanisms, the distinction among which is underdetermined by a short-term change variable.  No philosophical crisis in that; just complicated work to control and sort it out.  (And of course, there is a third possibility: that there is no selection by predation in real-time, and there never had been in history; it is a pure coincidence that chemicals from forest fires change the pigmentation of moths.  To sort that out, one needs a null model for when a “coincidence” is improbably fortuitous.  Such null models can be the hardest of all to defend quantitatively against nitpickers, but within a domain of “good enough” that we use for almost-everything else, we can probably estimate one for this case.)

Of course, one can load other requirements on top of the 8 steps above to the term “Darwinism", and that is why I was asking Dave which ones he had in mind.  

9.  You could say we are only going to call it “selection” when the stuff involved is organized by an architecture of individuals and populations, the criteria for which must then be declared for us to know what we purport to talk about.  Otherwise we will just refer to it as “dynamics”.  So “selection” becomes a reserved term for things that are more distinctively like what is so glaring in biology.

10.  You could say “Darwinism” means “not Lamarckism”, meaning that you are supposing a particular form of separation between germ-type heredity and phenotypic development, and you want to quarrel about which cases deserved to be discussed.

11. You could mean the word “Darwinism” as a sociological and pejorative term, to refer to facile explanations that reflect prejudice or pre-formed opinions more than careful observation and reasoning.

All of those uses are quite common.  

But I think Glen has nicely put this to bed by removing the specter of early Popper, with a more moderated late Popper, though still of only modest sophistication in his stance compared to what is available today from a good use of knowledge in developmental biology and many other sub-domains bearing on evolutionary dynamics.

Anyway…

Eric

> On Dec 13, 2021, at 2:04 PM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Right. Sorry if I painted you with that brush. I thought about adding an addendum of my own opinion, but thought it important to clarify Popper without muddying it with my own thoughts.
> 
> Now, I feel free to stir up the silt. *Some* concept (not nec. Popper's) of a metaphysical program should work well for those other efforts. As we've discussed, here, much of it dangles off of a scaffold built on the concept of consistency (writ large). A great deal of (pure?) mathematics is interesting in it's flabergasting feeling of how well it all hangs together. It's that same "seeking"/apophenic drive that we find in QAnon "researchers" and quantum woo fans. "It just all makes so much sense!" Similarly with people who are convicted of their own metaphysics. To my mind, if it makes that much sense, then it must be *false*, not true. The world is always and everywhere *messy*. But I'm clearly in the minority in that aesthetic.
> 
> As I tried to argue before, though, consistency is only half the justification for a metaphysical program. The other half is completeness ... which isn't given as high a priority amongst our rationality-obsessed brethren. Going back to the idea I broached to EricS recently about adjointness (in it's "weakly equivalent" sense), we can imagine a world where relations (or operations) are lossy, including the consequence/cause relation. And we can imagine an inference system (language?, algebra?, etc.) where relations are *not* lossy. Then regardless of how well that inference system hangs together (is consistent), there will be thing-a-ma-jigs in the world that it doesn't cover ... those interdigital parts that are ignored/abstracted by the inference system.
> 
> Natural selection *attempts* to meet both consistency and completeness with vast, persnickety, story-telling that comes off a bit like special pleading at times. But it does seem like a good program because it treats both. If the story-telling in Jung et al tried seriously to address both consistency and completeness, then it might work for them, too.
> 
> On 12/13/21 10:25 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>> Thank you glen. This clarifies a lot and addresses Steve's question as well.
>> 
>> i included creationists with a great deal of trepidation, because i assumed it would prompt immediate rejection of the entire question. 
>> 
>> I do think there is some validity in considering the framework / testable scientific theory question with regard things like Whitehead's process philosophy, Jung's alchemy, some portion of the science-faith reconciliation efforts, and, of course, mysticism and altered states of consciousness.
>> 
>> davew
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Dec 13, 2021, at 9:44 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>>> The creationists have been peddling this rhetoric for a very long time. 
>>> It's important to read Popper's recant and clarification. From Popper's 
>>> 1978 paper "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind":
>>> 
>>> "However, Darwin's own most important contribution to the theory of 
>>> evolution, his theory of natural selection, is difficult to test. There 
>>> are some tests, even some experimental tests; and in some cases, such 
>>> as the famous phenomenon known as "industrial melanism", we can observe 
>>> natural selec- tion happening under our very eyes, as it were. 
>>> Nevertheless, really severe tests of the theory of natural selection 
>>> are hard to come by, much more so than tests of otherwise comparable 
>>> theories in physics or chemistry.  The fact that the theory of natural 
>>> selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and 
>>> even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a tautology. A 
>>> tautology like "All tables are tables" is not, of course, test- able; 
>>> nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to 
>>> hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves 
>>> formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology 
>>> that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring. 
>>> And C. H. Waddington even says somewhere (and he defends this view in 
>>> other places) that "Natural selection . . . turns out ... to be a 
>>> tautology". 6 However, he attributes at the same place to the theory an 
>>> "enormous power ... of explanation". Since the explanatory power of a 
>>> tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong here.
>>> 
>>> Yet similar passages can be found in the works of such great Darwinists 
>>> as Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and George Gaylord Simpson; and 
>>> others.
>>> 
>>> I mention this problem because I too belong among the culprits. Influ- 
>>> enced by what these authorities say, I have in the past described the 
>>> theory as "almost tautological", 7 and I have tried to explain how the 
>>> theory of natural selection could be untestable (as is a tautology) and 
>>> yet of great scientific interest. My solution was that the doctrine of 
>>> natural selection is a most suc- cessful metaphysical research 
>>> programme. It raises detailed problems in many fields, and it tells us 
>>> what we would expect of an acceptable solution of these problems.
>>> 
>>> I still believe that natural selection works in this way as a research 
>>> pro- gramme. Nevertheless, I have changed my mind about the testability 
>>> and the logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am 
>>> glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation. My recantation may, 
>>> I hope, contribute a little to the understanding of the status of 
>>> natural selection. What is important is to realize the explanatory task 
>>> of natural selection; and especially to realize what can be explained 
>>> without the theory of natural selection."
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 12/13/21 8:32 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>>> Dave, to clarify:
>>>> 
>>>> What does Popper (or what do you) take to be the referent for the tag “Darwinism”.  The term has gone through so many hands with so many purposes, that I am hesitant to engage with only the term, without a fuller sense of what it stands for in the worldview of my interlocutor.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> 
>>>> Eric
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Dec 13, 2021, at 10:33 AM, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> “/Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program—a possible framework for testable scientific theories./”  
>>>>>                       Karl Popper.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I like this distinction but immediately wonder if it might provide some analytical / research means that could be applied to other "metaphysical research programs" — creationism for example, or the plethora of efforts, by scientists, to reconcile their faith with their science. Or, Newton's [and Jung's] (in)famous commitment to Egyptian Alchemy.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Would it be possible to use the Tao de Ching or the Diamond Sutra or Whitehead's Process Philosophy (not a random selection, I group the three intentionally) as a metaphysical research program and derive some interesting and useful science?
>>>>> 
>>>>> davew
> 
> 
> -- 
> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
> 
> 
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