Effect of time loops on evolution

[Loren Booda]

It occurred to me that the existence of localized time reversal would manifest an evolution that relies more on free will than genetic determination. The connectivity between two events completing a time loop takes place arbitrarily to Darwinism, either fulfilling spacetime continuity or evoking the ability of the observer to change her destiny.

In both cases, the normally linear progression of evolution would interfere with itself, overwriting entire branches of biological history. Even time-symmetric quantum mechanics may influence microscopic DNA. Adaptation becomes a physical process of participation, rather than a primal matter of survival.

[Please respond succinctly.]

 

[Another God]

Is this succinct?

Huh?

 

[Mentat]

Loren, I'd like to respond, but I have only a vague idea of what you are trying to get across. The subject is the "effect of time loops on evolution". This is an interesting approach, but I got a little lost in your first post. If you could clarify your meaning, I'd be glad to try to respond.

 

[Loren Booda]

Being able to go back in time would play havoc with evolution. Think of the Simpsons episode where Homer sneezes on a dinosaur - but that incident inhabiting one of many "pockets" (some microminiature) in spacetime where an adaptation is trapped or itself changes only locally. Thus evolution could be affected by, restricted to, or temporarily (re)cycled within arbitrary time loops. The more-or-less linear progression that Darwin envisioned would, under this alternative scenario, have a nonlinear timeline changing with space, as well as an environment changing with nonlinear time. Evolution here is greatly relative to the observer.

 

[Mentat]

Originally posted by Loren Booda
Being able to go back in time would play havoc with evolution. Think of the Simpsons episode where Homer sneezes on a dinosaur - but that incident inhabiting one of many "pockets" (some microminiature) in spacetime where an adaptation is trapped or itself changes only locally. Thus evolution could be affected by, restricted to, or temporarily (re)cycled within arbitrary time loops. The more-or-less linear progression that Darwin envisioned would, under this alternative scenario, have a nonlinear timeline changing with space, as well as an environment changing with nonlinear time. Evolution here is greatly relative to the observer.

You know, I hadn't really considered this before. It does, however, remind me of a science fiction story I read once in an anthology of time travel sotries, by Robert Silverberg, called Voyagers in Time (or something like that). The story was called "the Brooklyn Project" (I think) and it was set in the near future. These people were sending two probes into the past and the future, respectively - basically, they would "bounce off of each other" in time. They were convinced that they wouldn't change anything. The announcer had been a typical, portly, man, who liked to yell a lot, at the beginning of the story. By the end of the story, he was a purple, gelatinous being, who didn't speak very much, but usually just communicated through his eight pseudopods (or something like that). Anyway, he exclaimed at the end, "You see, nothing has changed!".

If it were possible to go back in time, I believe we would influence our evolution, but not really, because we were "already there". IOW, if I go back the age of the dinosaurs and sneeze, then I (the time traveller from the 24th and a half century ) would have always existed in a world where the common cold (for example) had influenced the evolution of dinosaurs.