Is Evolution Universally Driven by Self-Perpetuating Processes?

[CaptainQuasar]

I've no difficulty with “organizational attractors”, except for a prejudice against long words (despite being accused by Cyrus in post # 10 of having "a lot of big words in your posts mixed in with science" ). Would this name imply a link with chaos theory?

That's where I got the term from, yeah. But I'm not implying any Lorentz-attractor-type math underneath it.

I was also thinking of "organizational principle" but that sounds a little too abstract.

By the way, you mention crystal growth and molecules in the same breath, as it were, whereas I tend to think of crystals with dislocations as being made of individual atoms, but for no good reason. Perhaps I should broaden my outlook, as it strikes me that DNA molecules, which are big but crystallise, have a spiral form. And the spiral nature of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_dislocation#Screw_dislocations" is exactly what promotes crystal growth. Could this have implications for the evolution of the DNA molecule, I wonder?

Now that you've linked to screw dislocation it makes sense that this would be involved in the crystallization of DNA. But I think that would only apply to helical molecules, right? Crystallization of sodium chloride / salt is simply a lateral dislocation, like cubes packed together. It's all just mathematical http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Packing.html" problems.

I don't have time to go into it now, but as said before, this thread is simply about the refusal to accept that "stellar evolution" (or various other kinds) and "biological evolution" are two completely separate concepts and do not share a single set of governing principles.

One fundamental difference is the lack of a random element in "stellar evolution". You can take two clouds of hydrogen of a given mass and density and be able to predict with an extremely high degree of accuracy what the life cycle of the resulting star will look like. You cannot do the same with biological evolution.

There is no philosophical question here. Only a refusal to accept that there are different definitions for the same word.

Yeah, they do share a set of governing principles. Like I said, they're both self-perpetuating processes that organize their substrate medium.

oldman gave other examples even in his original post: development of social structures and development of technologies. And now we're talking about crystal formation.

I would agree that there isn't any underlying universal mechanism involved here but the principles are the same. To assert that this isn't a valid observation is silly. Give the vocabulary stuff a rest, will you?

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This points out to me that there's a third concept involved here. In addition to systemic autoconvolution itself and the organizational attractors or organizational principles, there's a different substrate medium in each case. In the case of biological evolution, astronomical structures, and crystals the substrate is matter and in the case of social structures and technology the substrate is http://www.jom-emit.org/" .

You know, maybe this is part of the reason why memetics is being so slow to develop as a field. I think it really needs to be viewed much more abstractly, as a matter of patterns or mathematics, to get properly bootstrapped as a science. People focus too much on the analogy to genetics. Another terminology problem, sigh...

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[CaptainQuasar]

http://www.upcomillas.es/webcorporativo/Centros/catedras/ctr/Documentos/TRIABIECarreira06.pdf" is drawing the same paralells. From page 8:

We seem, therefore, to be in a position to attribute life to the same play of necessity and chance that produces a galaxy or a crystal.

And this Science Frontiers article makes an analogy between the arrangement of galactic superclusters and crystals in an article called http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf110/sf110p03.htm" :

Recent redshift measurements, however, hint more and more forcefully that the huge superclusters of galaxies are almost as neatly arranged as the atoms in a crystal.

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Hmm... just as a tangent, I wonder how long after the Big Bang that crystalline matter first appeared in the universe.

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[russ_watters]

Yeah, they do share a set of governing principles. Like I said, they're both self-perpetuating processes that organize their substrate medium.

I'll grant you that, but that's pretty broad. They share some general purpose features of the definition (that's why the name was chosen), but they also have other governing principles that they don't share. The random element is an important one for the OP's discussion because he seems to be implying that evolution has a direction. The fact that you cannot set up a set of initial conditions and run a simulation that closely matches biological evolution is a critical difference in the two definitions.

It's easier to see if you just look it up in the dictionary. The word "evolution" has a number of general purpose definitions and a few special purpose definitions. The "biological evolution" definition is a subset of the general purpose definitions, but not vice versa. Ie, you can apply the general purpose definition "any process of formation or growth; development" to both biology and cosmology, but you cannot apply the special purpose definition "change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift" to astronomy. They are, for practial purposes, different words.

oldman gave other examples even in his original post: development of social structures and development of technologies. And now we're talking about crystal formation.

Yes. All these are examples of not being the same thing as biological evolution.

I would agree that there isn't any underlying universal mechanism involved here but the principles are the same. To assert that this isn't a valid observation is silly. Give the vocabulary stuff a rest, will you?

In a disagreement about a definition, the vocabulary stuff is everything.

...memetics...

Continuing with the above tack, the definition of "meme" says explicitly that it is an analogy, as you correctly point out below. It's a similar concept, but not the same thing.

... is being so slow to develop as a field. I think it really needs to be viewed much more abstractly, as a matter of patterns or mathematics, to get properly bootstrapped as a science.

That second sentence is self-contradictory. Viewing/approaching something abstractly is precisely the opposite of what we go for with science.

 

[russ_watters]

Lets have another look at the OP's question:

The details of how evolution (if this is indeed the right term to use) operates in each case are of course different. The purpose of this post is to ask folk who take an interest in the whys and wherefores of such matters (those who have a philosophical bent and some knowledge of physics?) if there could be a common factor that defines “evolution”.

Now please don't take my position the wrong way: I have, in fact, argued in favor of such things as social development being evolutionary processes with similar drivers to biological evolution. I do believe that social development is a "survival of the fittest" (a "Darwinian") process. But while this is similar to biological evolution and the usage of the word is the same, things like "stellar evolution" are not.

So perhaps what we may want to do here is make two lists - one of things that follow the general biological concept of evolution and ones that don't. That's actually relatively easy since the word "evolution" predates Darwin and you can simply look at the history and development of these areas of study to find the answer. Ie, the concept of "social evolution" isn't referred to as "social evolution", it is referred to as "social Darwinism". Stellar evolution, on the other hand, is not referred to as a Darwinian process.

Now, that said, things like the pursuit of science can be considered Darwinian processes, but the cone of potential paths is inverted: biological evolution diverges, evolution of physics theories (and political/social theories) converges.

 

[CaptainQuasar]

But he's not talking about Darwinian processes. Don't you see that you're getting waaaay to hung up on the word he used and there's another conversation to be had here? That's why as soon as I suggested an alternative term that fit well he said “Great! Let's use that!”

In particular, we're also not talking about stellar evolution, which has to do with the lifecycles of stars and how the initial fusion-production of heavier elements in early stars and supernovae was necessary for the later types of stars to develop. We're instead talking about the formation of planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters and superclusters by gravity. But stellar evolution might be another good one to add to the list.

You're so hung up on the word “evolution” that you're having difficulty even understanding the argument being made here.

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[CaptainQuasar]

Viewing/approaching something abstractly is precisely the opposite of what we go for with science.

I guess you're an experimental scientist instead of a theorist.

You get to the hypotheses you're going to test through abstract thinking that often violates your current understanding of the subject.

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[oldman]

I don't have time to go into it now, but as said before, this thread is simply about the refusal to accept that "stellar evolution" (or various other kinds) and "biological evolution" are two completely separate concepts and do not share a single set of governing principles.

One fundamental difference is the lack of a random element in "stellar evolution". You can take two clouds of hydrogen of a given mass and density and be able to predict with an extremely high degree of accuracy what the life cycle of the resulting star will look like. You cannot do the same with biological evolution.

There is no philosophical question here. Only a refusal to accept that there are different definitions for the same word.

I think you are being too didactic. I'm suggesting that it is interesting to consider similarities between processes which promote complexity, and that using the adjective "evolutionary" to describe them brings this out. Such similarities may be the result of a common "governing principle". Or they may not. Not the same as "refusing to accept different definitions of the same word". Perhaps there is no philosophical question here, but some discussion can't hurt.

 

[oldman]

.
Now that you've linked to screw dislocation it makes sense that this would be involved in the crystallization of DNA. But I think that would only apply to helical molecules, right? Crystallization of sodium chloride / salt is simply a lateral dislocation, like cubes packed together. It's all just mathematical http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Packing.html" problems.

Another niggle: No, there are two separate things here. The presence of screw dislocations is what makes (one) crystallisation possible at otherwise impossibly small supersaturations, whether it be of DNA or of ordinary salt. (There ain't such an animal as a "lateral dislocation", by the way.)

I was suggesting that the primeval (two) evolution of the helical DNA molecule itself, about which we seem to know little, could be linked to the helical character of a screw dislocation. But this is just an idle thought, since I know nothing about the evolution of huge molecules like DNA. But it must be quite a difficult process. Or life would spontaneously have appeared on Earth much more quickly than it apparently did.

 

[CaptainQuasar]

The presence of screw dislocations is what makes (one) crystallisation possible at otherwise impossibly small supersaturations, whether it be of DNA or of ordinary salt. (There ain't such an animal as a "lateral dislocation", by the way.)

Oh, I see, it has nothing to do with packing. I hadn't read enough of the article.

That's an interesting theory about the relationship to the origin of DNA. Thanks for taking the time to explain it.

(Heh, the reason I misunderstood the screw dislocation stuff in the first place is because I got hung up on the meaning of the word "dislocation".)

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[CaptainQuasar]

And by the way, it does make sense to speak of crystals as essentially single large molecules with atoms as their components, it's more descriptive than regarding them as aggregations of molecules.

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[russ_watters]

I guess you're an experimental scientist instead of a theorist.

You get to the hypotheses you're going to test through abstract thinking that often violates your current understanding of the subject.

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Wow, no. There is no such dichotomy. There is only one scientific method.

A scientist uses experimentation to prove or disprove a theory. If the data shows a theory is wrong, a new theory is formulated that fits the data. A new theory violates current theory because the data says the current theory is flawed. The logic required for that is not abstract, it is concrete and linear. The way humans sometimes do pattern recognition can be abstract, but when applied to science, it generally isn't. Newton didn't dream-up the inverse square law, he derived it mathematically. Finding a new path can require creative/outside-the-box thinking, but that should not be confused with being abstract. The scientific method is highly structured and logical.

 

[russ_watters]

I think you are being too didactic.

Perhaps. I must admit to only skimming the thread and the way you worded your thesis caught my eye. If you realize the distinction and are beyond it, fair enough.

 

[CaptainQuasar]

Newton wasn't thinking abstractly? Are you kidding?

The guy who extended his everyday experiences into a formalism that described parts of the universe and phenomena he'd never seen and technologies from hundreds of years in the future? Like rocketry - the closest analogy he could come up with when talking about taking derivatives for something that lost mass as it moved was a farmer's hay cart with the farmer pitching piles of hay off it as a horse pulled it along.

I don't want to derail this thread. If you want to insist that science doesn't involve abstract thinking, despite the fact that it spends all of its time building rules and models for the real world that humans can easily hold in their heads (like the mathematical models physics deals in), then fine, you're welcome to. Feel free to take the final word on this topic, or start a new thread and give a link and I'll follow you.

P.S. One last thing... the words you're using here seem odd to me. Abstract doesn't mean “creative” and it is not the opposite of structured and logical. In fact an abstraction is often imposing structure and logic on an apparently unstructured and illogical subject matter. The scientific method itself is an abstraction - an empirical approach to epistemology.

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[baywax]

And by the way, it does make sense to speak of crystals as essentially single large molecules with atoms as their components, it's more descriptive than regarding them as aggregations of molecules.

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What's interesting is that viruses are encased in a crystalline shell. I've been contemplating Virogenesis as the beginning of life on earth. Virogenesis isn't a word yet... but, my model involved viruses that have either developed here on Earth or have populated the Earth since they can withstand the rigors of space in a dormant state.

The idea that crystals develop the same way vdna or vrna developed might be bolstered by the idea that viruses are partially of a crystalline nature themselves.

As I've touched on here... biological matter and all other matter are comprised of the same elements. This ensures that we'll see perceptively similar mechanisms taking place in both types of matter. However, only one of them, so far, has been found to develop and evolve a genetic system which stores and propagates information about the structure, preferences and survival techniques (instincts) of the host.

 

[CaptainQuasar]

What's interesting is that viruses are encased in a crystalline shell. I've been contemplating Virogenesis as the beginning of life on earth. Virogenesis isn't a word yet... but, my model involved viruses that have either developed here on Earth or have populated the Earth since they can withstand the rigors of space in a dormant state.

That's certainly an interesting idea. You've probably seen the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus" , the gigantic virus they discovered in 1992 that's larger than many forms of bacteria.

But isn't part of the definition of a virus that it needs another organism's cellular mechanisms to reproduce itself?

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[baywax]

That's certainly an interesting idea. You've probably seen the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus" , the gigantic virus they discovered in 1992 that's larger than many forms of bacteria.

But isn't part of the definition of a virus that it needs another organism's cellular mechanisms to reproduce itself?

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Yes... we could go into this. Its not really philosophy. But... I have the stats on the mimivirus or megavirus. Its completely nutso. There's a chance viruses used other viruses to replicate themselves once out of dormancy.