[ExI] Evolution is not random,...

[Khaled Aly]

Title sounds too abbreviating and attention catching, I don't think it's 
what the authors' precisely meant by the study. May I share some random 
thoughts about probability and perspectives. Mathematicians welcome to 
bring more vigor to these loose inquisitions ...

How many processes govern evolution? What is developmental evolution 
with respect to evolution as a whole (for a non-biologist)? The study 
was conducted over a "small" sample of a small number of spices where 
the stochastic laws of large numbers do not apply (expectation is most 
accurate towards infinity). It was also limited to a limited number of 
those spices' body members. If evolution is deterministic at some level, 
we should be able to confirm for sure some features of some future 
generation of some living organism. Actually, is there anything no 
matter how simple 'really' deterministic? And if we could determine the 
infinite th moment (or all moments) of any random variable, not to 
mention a convoluted natural process, don't we just get its full 
distribution, which doesn't make it deterministic?

Could an analogy be drown to continuous and discrete quantities, and 
which approximate which? One can count discrete apples but can never 
'exactly' measure a mile or a micron, though both are discrete whole 
units. Isn't a digital computer made of analog devices using thresholds 
to resolve discreteness out of continuity, with a 'seemingly' digital 
clock that exponentially rises and falls and 'fluctuates' around its 
ensemble average level and frequency? How many agree that analog 
computers are more accurate than digital ones? Simply put, what exactly 
is the time anywhere anytime?

Cheers
ka


Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 11:21 AM 11/26/2007 -0500, Dan wrote:
>
>   
>> I think the better way of putting it is it's blind -- regardless of
>> whether the processes underlying it are stochastic or deterministic or a
>> little of both.  This means simply that it isn't forward-looking.
>>     
>
> As Robert Picone noted, the original article wasn't talking about 
> *evolution* (whatever that means), but made a drastically more 
> limited claim, namely:
>
> <The actual study made no such claims, they said that developmental 
> evolution in the nematode vulva occurred  primarily through 
> deterministic mechanisms.
>
> <Basically, it was a claim that when ways to form a single, already 
> defined structure are evolving, only two of forty factors were 
> random, while the others were at least somewhat convergent.>
>
> But suppose the question is regarded more generally. How do we *know* 
> evolutionary change does not sometimes contain a forward-looking 
> component, a kind of foresight or preemptive adaptation? The  answer 
> seems obvious: firstly, because the altered future to which any 
> critter would have to be pre-adapted is unknown and unknowable; and 
> even if it were in principle calculable by an intelligence, the genes 
> don't have direct knowledge of the world, nor any means to calculate 
> probabilities, nor any means to modify themselves except via random 
> shufflings.
>
> But is all of this true? And how do we know it is? Has anyone put it 
> to the test? Might it explain certain aspects of life without doing 
> violence to what's already known? The proposition seems so outrageous 
> that I'd bet very few scientists in the last half century have ever 
> tried to model the question.
>
> Suppose some of the spare clock cycles of any complex brain were used 
> to model (i.e. imagine counterfactually) the benefits of certain 
> phenotypic changes in worlds somewhat different from here&now. 
> Absurd, of course, but if that were possible (say, if the Penrose 
> hypothesis is right, and brains are quantum computers), and if some 
> kinds of bio-feedback allowed microchanges at the cellular and 
> genomic levels that conduced to favoured phenotypes, might we see a 
> kind of Lamarckian aspect to evolution?
>
> Suppose further that some kinds of psi are real, that a sheaf of most 
> probably futures and their weightings can be glimpsed in advance, and 
> that a kind of anomalous perturbation or psychokinesis at the 
> microlevel can deform genomes to create phenotypes better fitted to 
> such imminent environments... Absurd, of course, everyone knows that, 
> but still--suppose it were the case...
>
> What sort of experiments have been done that would reveal such a 
> feature of evolution?
>
> Cutting off the foreskins of umpteen Jewish generations is NOT a 
> test, disproving any such effect by the lack of babies born without 
> foreskins. There's no life-and-death crisis connected with being born 
> with a foreskin; indeed, it's possible that in a culture where 
> circumcision is mandatory and numinous, being born without a foreskin 
> would make a boy freakish and disadvantaged.
>
> But one might make several preparations of a known bacterial or 
> murine population into which, at random or by preordained choice, 
> certain poisons or currently-undigestible-nutrients will be 
> introduced in two or three generations' time. Might there be an 
> anticipatory genomic shift? This sort of "precognitive" advance 
> adaptation would distinguish the eventual genome distribution from 
> that of control groups. (I'm no experimentalist; this might not be 
> the best way to test the idea.)
>
> Is there any cultural difference between human or other complex 
> mammal groups that might display such an effect unambiguously? The 
> question, to say it yet again, is absurd, of course--but it's 
> entertaining to think about how one might *test* such unthinkable 
> ideas, rather than simply dismissing them ex cathedra.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
>
>
>
>
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