[Paleopsych] is evolutionary change stockpiled?

[Werbos, Dr. Paul J.]

Good morning folks!

One reason I like Greg's books is that he -- like other good fictions 
writers --
"puts it together." There are lots of verbal theories espoused in social
science, especially, which, when translated into a picture... don't translate.
And when ideas are translated into a picture... it tells us something we 
wouldn't have seen
otherwise. That's a very important part of .. advancing our thought.

But, as with other compelling pieces of fiction, like Ayn Rand or most of 
the Bible,
we then may move on to ask which parts were real and essential, which were 
interesting but uncertain,
and which were just props. We don't always know.

The core message that most of our DNA may be involved in a kind of 
"intelligence" function,
a kind of metagenetic system, is important ... and I think it is inescapable.

My views here are influenced heavily by what I have seen with intelligence 
in neural network systems where,
for good or ill, I would claim to have tangible scientific knowledge a bit 
more than others.
(I could elaborate but not this morning.)

It is clear that an effective learning system needs to exercise more 
resources to the learning itself than it does
to the "crystallized" stimulus-memory-response patterns which it learns. 
That's a general
sort of reality, and it would apply to genetic systems as well. Certainly 
there are times when slow learning or adaptation
gets you killed. Thus there is a strong evolutionary advantage to having 
systems which can adapt better.
Also... on the whole... life today seems to evolve faster than the life of 
the preCambrian era.
It does indeed seem to have evolved an evolutionary capability.  And then 
the "junk DNA"
fraction provides strong confirmation of what we should have expected.

Good learning abilities do not come cheap. And that's something I could 
elaborate on later.

But...

What about stockpiling? That's a different question.

I would think of it more as maintaining a kind of sphere of variance... 
analogous to what people would
do with... extended Kalman filtering or particle filtering or a system 
called SEDP/TLRN (which is like particle filtering but more
efficient)... well....

There is a problem with stockpiling PIECES of a new state , when the 
COMBINATION of pieces has never been tested together.

Greg's novels do discuss some of the problems that can occur, actually, in 
settling down when the rate of deployment of
stockpiled variations rises very suddenly. There is a whole range of 
plausible systems, ranging from
continuous deployment and testing of new ... phenotypes?.... to what Greg 
portrays, ultradiscontinuous...


But... I am not an evolutionary theorist, and the clock just came online...

Best,

    Paul 
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