More discussion on evolution theories, and a bit about Trivium and Quadrivium

View 800 Tuesday, November 26, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

 

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

 

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Dentist appointment today; all is on the proper track. The abscess removed when the old wisdom tooth came out was probably responsible for a lot of my energy losses last year, and it will take a while for the immune system to recover, but that will happen; maybe I’ll get back to some of the levels I used to have. Meanwhile my jaw doesn’t hurt as much as it did, Deo gratia.

My son Frank came in from Texas to spend Thanksgiving, and got in late this evening. Alex came over for a while. Sable was overjoyed. She misses the boys. She went to bed happy.

We have a lot of mail on the evolution discussion. Understand that my position is that I am prepared to accept something like Darwinian evolution and have been since high school; but given the complexity of life and what we have learned since Darwin wrote, I can’t believe that the blind workings of chance took us from the slime to Swan Lake. I have seen, for instance, the model by which light sensitive cells evolved into a socketed eye, and once you have an eye it’s credible that it kept improving by gradual steps, each step making the organism that has it a bit more ‘fit’ than its predecessors; but the early steps of the process don’t do that. If you know where you are going, you can watch for random developments that lead you in that direction, but that isn’t Darwin: Darwinian selection postulates that each step must be an ‘improvement’ over the last, not just a step toward an eye from a light sensitive cell, but a definite improvement over its predecessor causing the improved model to have more survivable offspring.

And overall I have to say with Fred, it’s easier to believe that a cloud of gas by chance turned into San Francisco and danced Swan Lake if you have been smoking Drano.

Hi Jerry,

I read with interest your posting on "Asking Questions about Darwin" (https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=16304). You used an example of evolution involving a bag of watch parts and the probability that shaking said bag would result in a fully functional watch. Or rather, the improbability of such a result without the involvement of an "Intelligent Designer".

I must say, were evolution as complex as you make it out to be, then the most parsimonious answer would be that an intelligent designer was probably involved. However, your analogy is… incorrect…

While you could use a "bag of stuff" as an analogy to describe evolution, the contents of said bag would have to be a lot different than watch parts, although a timekeeping device could reasonably be the outcome of this process.

Please allow me to repeat that. We could indeed get a functional watch out of a bag of parts through a stochastic process… But it requires lots of bags, and a process that sieves the successes of one bag into the next bag.

To bring the analogy in line with what is actually going on in evolution, you would have to start with something simple like the attached image of a child’s toy. Place that in a bag. Shake it around long enough and some of the shapes will make it through to the inside of the sphere. Most will not…

This is the "test", as it were, and it is no more complex than that. The steps are small, and the evaluation process is unambiguous. Nature shakes the bag, the parts change slightly, and we see what survives. Lather, rinse, repeat…

From such humble beginnings, endless levels of complexity can come about as long as it receives energy inputs from the sun.

..Ch:W..

Lots of bags is fine; but sieving the ‘successes’ implies that you know where you are going. That is what we haven’t settled.

Jerry,

The flaw in the evolution-as-watch-assembly analogy is the whole Newtonian dead-matter mistake. The components of a watch have no natural telos to come together (even when shaken vigorously in a box) and must be forced together artificially. The "components" of a natural thing come together naturally (i.e., by their essential natures). For example, shake ethanoyl chloride and ammonia together in a box (reactor) and they will self-assemble into ethanamide and ammonium chloride. And the parts (not "components) of a living thing are not even assembled — they grow out of one another.

The probability argument is bogus for this and other reasons. There is no probability simpliciter; there is only probability-given-a-model. Or as Einstein once told Heisenberg, "theory determines what can be observed." The probability argument typically makes model assumptions about component p’s and independence. So given n components, you get P=p1*p2*p3*…*pn, which can get tolerably small mighty fast as n increases. But the probabilities of the "components" are not independent and the usual STAT 101 methods don’t apply. What’s the probability of a finger? Now take that to the 10th power and see how unlikely your hands are.

It is also the case in nature that what a component does depends on what whole it is a part of. A free electron behaves differently from an electron in a valence orbit. What a gene does depends on what other genes are nearby — and on epigenetic and environmental factors. The helmeted water flea develops its helmet in the presence of chemical markers of a predator fish. Raised in a fish-free tank, cloned populations of the flea do no develop the "helmet." Same genes, different outcome. A Mediterranean wall lizard that lived a carnivorous life on a certain island became a vegetarian when it was transferred to another, plant-bearing island; and within twenty years had developed the organs for digesting the plant matter. What are the odds? Chance may not be at the heart of the matter.

Furthermore, modern genetics is discovering that genetic change can be massive, sudden, and specific, putting the punct in punctuated equilibrium, so to speak. Shapiro at Chicago is big on this. This video shows why few actual working scientists become media stars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06hUABCuXBw&t=37m17s Some of Shapiro’s papers can be found here: http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/

Now the idea that a mid-Victorian country squire hit on the Truth About Everything is remarkable, and biologists could learn a bit from the physicists, who have quite happily abandoned what they thought they knew ca. 1860. There could easily be multiple processes at work in evolution, just as there are in local motion (gravity, electromagnetism, etc. — and we have turned "gravity" inside out since the Widow of Windsor’s day). So the "striving to the utmost" to reproduce coupled with the "struggle for existence" that forms the Darwinian engine may not account for everything in sight — except in the tautological sense that "survivors survive."

Re: design. The idea that the unlikeliness of the outcome is evidence of design would have astonished Thomas Aquinas, whose Fifth Way proceeded from the dependable lawfulness of nature, not from the inexplicable or unlikely. He would have regarded gravitational attraction of a falling stone as every bit as much evidence of design as the intricacies of molecular biology. He even commented on the possibility of new species emerging: "Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning." IOW, new species would come about by some natural process on which he was as unclear as his contemporaries. Replace "putrefaction" with "mutation" and specify the "powers of the elements" as the various genetic processes, and we see that he was lacking in the details.

And Augustine once wrote that when God created, he created "what was to be in times to come."

Mike F

Biodiversity

Jerry,

I’ve never found evolution to be a satisfying explanation for the existence of biodiversity. Natural selection destroys biodiversity, and more importantly, the universe, as best we know it, resolves to a state of maximum uniformity (whatever that looks like). Think of it as entropy in action.

I find God a much more satisfying answer. More precisely, I believe that God is, in a sense, the opposite of entropy.

Instead of resolving to maximum uniformity, God resolves to maximum diversity. Instead of resolving to a state of minimum possible information, God resolves to maximum possible information, intelligence, sentience, and being. I can’t think of anything more worthy of being called God than such an alien entity.

At any rate, the point is diversity. I believe God created life to be infinitely diverse, based upon themes. Each beetle is intended to be a unique variation on a theme of beetles. So too, for canines, felines, bacteria, and all other life.

I think of it as Bach’s Art of the Fugue writ large. It’s not the evolution of the species; it’s the revelation of the species. God is fond of diversity.

With that in mind, I consider plants and animals to be highly-advanced technology. I recall seeing a TV show about a predator that has varying number of offspring based on food availability, and it occurred to me that the creature was deliberately altering the state of the next generation based upon the environment.

What if that were built in, to a much greater degree? I saw a recent proposal that bacteria are "evolving evolvability"

in regards to resistance to antibiotics, and that idea seemed to be dancing around an obvious conclusion: bacteria are deliberately changing themselves to resist antibiotics.

One thing I expect is that the universe will continue to surprise us. It declares a diversity we haven’t exhausted.

Wherever we look, we find something new, and that’s exciting. I’d hate to live in a universe that was bland and uniform.

Finally, I find it interesting that the inversion of the question of diversity is echoed across history:

In a universe of so much diversity, why is there entropy? Why is there pain?

In a universe of so much entropy, why is there diversity? Why is there life?

Good questions, both.

(Yeah, yeah, I know: mention evolution, and the crackpots come out. 🙂

-Philip

Sir Fred and Evolution

Dear Jerry, I hope you are feeling better and your tests reveal nothing serious. Regarding Sir Fred Hoyle’s views on creation, perhaps I do no understand them as well as I ought, but doesn’t he just push back the question rather than answer it? I mean for him, who created the creators. – Anyway have a happy Thanksgiving.

Jim Hickey

Yes, of course he did. But then everyone simply “pushes back” the question of why is there something rather than nothing. Aristotle wondered at all that.

Squaring entropy and evolution —

Dr. Pournelle:

Your [and Fred’s] thoughts on evolution reminded me of a conundrum I’ve been pondering for several years. Perhaps it is my own faulting understanding of the issues, but I’ve been given to understand that entropy always increases.

Now take a step back in evolution to the organic soup ocean way back when. If entropy always increases, how did self-replicating molecules organize themselves and keep evolving? To use your analogy, that random set of watch parts had to shake together just right against the "rules" of the universe as we understand them. There’s a flaw somewhere in our [my] understanding.

Pete Nofel

Here, you haven’t been smoking enough Drano…

Hi Jerry,

I’m sorry to hear you’re under the weather. Get better, please. We need your insights now more than ever and, of course, more Janissaries books, a follow up to The Burning Tower, a sequel to Escape from Hell, and maybe a new Motie book?

I’m writing in response to the Fred on Everything article

(http://fredoneverything.net/BotFly.shtml) you mentioned on 23 November. I really enjoy reading Fred. His comments are almost always interesting and bring up points I hadn’t considered. He doesn’t have the insight you have, but he does make for an interesting read – usually.

I have to take him to task for this article, however. He starts off well – a smart hamster is still a hamster. Humans believe themselves intelligent when, in fact, the universe is more strange than we can begin to imagine. He then devolves into the fallacy of irreducible complexity. In short, humans are not as smart as we think we are yet we are so smart we recognize complexity when we see it. It’s a bit like saying a circle is complex because of that odd number we call pi. Is that really a sign of complexity or is it a sign of our lack of understanding? We start with an assumption – a circle with diameter 1

– and work from there to pi. Anyone who has taken calculus has probably done the infinite series math to produce pi. I’m pretty sure, however, that the sun, as it formed a sphere, did not pull out a calculator and hit the button marked π. Humans need pi to understand circles. Circles don’t need pi to exist. The eye is complex only because even the smartest human is still human. Our inability to explain how things work or came into being says much more about us than it does about whether they are truly complex or just a result of natural processes.

Braxton Cook

I have never said I have a better theory of evolution, only that Darwinian selection by survival of the fittest offspring doesn’t work; or at best needs enormous faith to believe in it. Some things have to happen all at once, yet many of them have no obvious advantage to the offspring, and a few look to be thoroughly disadvantageous. Of course I neither can nor want to forbid you from believing in Darwinian selection as the mechanism that produced Swan Lake, but I don’t and can’t.

Which is probably enough since I have no argument to win; I simply can’t believe that ‘standard’ arguments of the evolutionists. I can accept that Darwinian selection can happen, and perhaps happen often; but I can’t buy the proposition that that’s all there is.

One more topic, and it’s bed time:

Dorothy Sayers on education

I’m a fan of Dorothy Sayers, both as a mystery writer and as an essayist, and I found the essay you pointed at interesting. But I think she may have gotten the medieval curriculum slightly wrong on one point: her description of the quadrivium as focused on content rather than method.

Years ago I encountered a discussion of medieval thought as making a threefold distinction between rhetoric, dialectic, and demonstration. Much more recently, with access to Internet searches, I looked into it further—and found that, like so much medieval, it went back to Aristotle. As Aristotle described it, rhetoric is discourse for people who do not engage in systematic reasoning, or for occasions that don’t readily allow it, such as political campaigns; for deductive reasoning it substitutes enthymeme, and for inductive reasoning it substitutes striking examples. (The unstated premises of enthymeme often amount to "common sense.") Dialectic is systematic reasoning, often in the Socratic mode, about matters of opinion or probability, where more than one thing might be true, and the proper approach is to say, "If A, B, and if B, C; but if A’, B’, and if B’, C’." But demonstration is also systematic reasoning, about things that are definitely known.

We need not, here, worry about philosophical arguments such as Descartes’s evil genius or Hume’s skepticism about causality; "definitely known" can include things like most immediate sensory observation, or well established scientific findings. To Aristotle, demonstration would have been well exemplified by geometry.

Now, in the medieval curriculum, rhetoric appeared under its own name, and dialectic likewise. But demonstration appeared in the form of geometry, and the other subjects of the quadrivium, arithmetic, astronomy, and music (which was mostly the arithmetic of fractions). The quadrivium was taught partly for content, but partly to teach the art of demonstration, the third Aristotelian form of discourse, and thus as training in a method of thinking. Indeed, I’ll bet that when you took plane geometry one of the reasons offered for learning it was that it trained your mind to think logically, which is exactly what the medievals thought it would do.

Perhaps Sayers focused on the content of the quadrivium because its subjects came less easily to her mind than those of the trivium, and thus required her to focus on what was being said more than on how it was arrived at. Or perhaps the method of the quadrivium seemed to her the same as that of the trivium; both after all rely on logic.

I’ve thought that it would be interesting to see a scheme of education that reflected this division, and so I found Sayers’s suggestions quite interesting, even when I didn’t fully agree. Thanks for calling this to my attention.

William H. Stoddard

I will let you and Mike Flynn discuss the finer points of the Trivium and Quadrivium; you both know more about that than I ever will. I’m the classic generalist, who learns a little about everything and tries to put it all together. I can tool up and specialize if I have to – I was once the world’s foremost expert on certain (now obsolete) military hardware because I was the only one with a certified need to know everything on the subject – but mostly I learn less and less about more and more….

 

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<http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2013/20131125_endofhurricaneseason.html>

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