Friam Digest, Vol 44, Issue 4

[Nick Thompson]

Phil,

I am so hot on Plausibility of Life that I bought 4 cc to circulate here
amongst the SAF folks.  So I wont hear a WORD against it.  NOT A SINGLE
WORD.  

I would mount a stalwart defense of it, except that my copy is buried at
the bottom of one of three HUGE book boxes I sent from the east that I have
not the courage (nor book cases to open).  Nonetheless, I will offer the
following.

I thought their point was exactly that evolution was not directed but that
it was predicated; i.e., highly circumscribed by that which has gone
before.  Strings of nucleotides and the cascades of enzyme events that they
facilitate get built in over time.  They become, in the jargon of the book,
highly conserved.  The interrelations between these sequence are governed
by "weak linkages", so it is possible for a environmental event or a
genetic event or a hormonal event to turn on and off whole functionally
organized cascades of developmental events (OH, THOMPSON, BLAH, BLAH,
BLAH).  

OK, start again.  Think about how a kid learns to ride a bicycle.  She
already has several highly conserved core processes available to her ....
balance, cornering, looming of objects when going forward,  features of the
pedaling motion which are similar to running, etc.  The physics of the
situation also provide many Constance as say, the relation between the tilt
of the bike and the tendency of the handlebars to flop to the right or
left.  (somebody PLEASE explain to me about angular momentum using very
small words!).  The kid struggles to assemble the core processes in such a
way that the bike doesn't fall over.   Given the goal of moving forward and
not falling down, the physics constrains this assemblage to certain
combinations.... (when you start to feel the bike tilt to the right, turn
your handle bars to the right.  So eventually, the whole mess gets put
together in a functional passage.  

But was there ever A HABIT of riding a bike (analogous to a gene for ....).
No, the constraints that make it possible are everywhere in the organism
and in the environment.  

In the metaphor above read "falling off the bike" as "death".  So the
organism can have the dual benefits of a tool box of developmental "tools"
that remain constant and the flexibility in the face variable environments.


So it's NOT directed evolution.  its facilitated evolution.  

I am, by the way,VERY  familiar with the feeling that comes when some
highly funded Harvard guy gets a book out of something that one has been
struggling with for years.   It's bitter sweet.  Bad side: They got the
word out, not me! Good side  Hooray, the word is finally out!!!!  I guess
the truth is that we all do our little parts in making the zeitgeist
happen.  It is characteristic of places like Harvard that they eat the cake
that others have been patiently baking,  But would any of us really be
happy at such a place???  I don't think so. Harvard would say that they
advance the cause of thought by bringing the Good People together where
they can do the Best Work. (cf SFI).  We dont know, however, what damage is
done to the local structures of intellectual development when the "good"
people are torn from them.  It's like rats eating dodo eggs. It makes for
larger and better rats.  

Nick  

> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 10:55:50 -0500
> From: "phil henshaw" <pfh at synapse9.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] The Plausibility of Life('s confusing arguments)
> To: "'FRIAM'" <Friam at redfish.com>
> Message-ID: <006001c747ab$c80b9350$2f01a8c0 at SavyII>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> I read several of the key arguments in Kirschner & Gerhart's book and
> found both more key confusions to match the tortured syntax of his
> title, and a silver lining.   On page 12, for example, if you discard
> the social politics and just parse the reasoning, they clearly assert
> that if an explanation could possibly be correct in any one case it must
> therefore be true in all cases.   It's not that I don't agree with the
> politics, it's that it's bad science.
>  
> Then in chapter seven, though, they clearly construct a mode of positive
> feedback for evolutionary directed variation.   This is the second such
> proposal I now know of, in addition to my own, and that would indeed
> explain a whole lot that Darwinian style random variation leaves blank.
> In 1978 I called it "The Unhidden Pattern Of Events" (and I've been
> exploring the possibilities for communicating it ever since!)  They
> propose that the "conserved processes","'during embryonic development"
> provide a core of "robustness" because "physiological adaptability
> suppresses lethality" so that variation at that stage is less
> destructive than creative.  
>  
> Their model may seem stated rather vaguely, but these things can take
> several tries.   Still it's quite similar in form and intent to my
> latest proposal that genetic feedback would be the natural result of
> selection applied to changes in a core & branch developmental structure,
> allowing the tips of the organizational branches to 'explore' their
> local peaks and valleys of new possibility.  The other one I know of
> taking this line is Peter Allen's model of change in socio-economic
> systems (ECO 11/2/06) in which he also explains variation as directing a
> core system to "explore" local pathways of possibilities.   The common
> link is that they all describe somewhat plausible ways in which the
> variation would be at a developmental fringe of organization and
> excluded from a core of resolved and stable structure.   That's part of
> what I'd like to publish in my plankton paper anyway, if anyone would
> let a very well constructed independent perspective get through the
> door.
>  
> Some might wonder why there's a struggle to find better ways to explain
> something that's supposed to have already been explained.  The problem
> with Darwin is the certainty that all evolution occurs by only one
> unsatisfactory means.   Directed selection by itself is unsatisfactory
> because it simply does not make new species.   It makes all kinds of
> different breeds of any one species, like all the kinds of dogs that are
> still grey wolfs as a species, but they're not new species.   New
> species are things that may come about by multiple means, but frequently
> by sudden appearances.   For those you need a kind of incremental
> process that also produces a rapid and coordinated change of state, a
> dynamic process that begins and ends.   Feedback systems, by combining
> directed variation with directed selection, do that handily.   I really
> wish I could find a journal competent in discussing the data of
> speciation that doesn't abhor the idea that it might involve a transient
> process!
>  
>
> Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 680 Ft. Washington Ave
> NY NY 10040                      
> tel: [phone]                
> e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
> explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>    
>  
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> End of Friam Digest, Vol 44, Issue 4
> ************************************

[Phil Henshaw-2]

Nick,

> Phil,
>
> I am so hot on Plausibility of Life that I bought 4 cc to
> circulate here amongst the SAF folks.  So I wont hear a WORD
> against it.  NOT A SINGLE WORD.  
Well, if skeptics are not ALLOWED... I guess it's not science.  I really
think a lot of sloppy thinking is hidden from us by our habits of
celebrating our own prejudices.   My point is that you can spot people
milking one's own prejudices, and it helps expose very interesting
issues that are 'hidden in sight'.
 
> I would mount a stalwart defense of it, except that my copy
> is buried at the bottom of one of three HUGE book boxes I
> sent from the east that I have not the courage (nor book
> cases to open).  Nonetheless, I will offer the following.
>
> I thought their point was exactly that evolution was not
> directed but that it was predicated; i.e., highly
> circumscribed by that which has gone before.  

My approach is more direct about the 'nuanced' type of directed
variation they admit to be critical.  To me 'historically dependent'
progression means variation localized in the direction of recent
variation.  Traditional Darwinian variation is random.   Maybe they try
to keep a lid on it, saying that their model still uses only 'random
variation' (with respect to the selection mechanisms), but then they
emphasize the strong directional tendency to the variation one would get
if one somehow eliminated all the dysfunctional stuff.  I think they do
that because it resolves Darwin's dilemma, that random variation with
respect to the design of life would be largely destructive.   Why people
have not been open to discussing that seems partly due to the defensive
political position scientists have taken and that's one of the things
that drew my attention to it.

> Strings of
> nucleotides and the cascades of enzyme events that they
> facilitate get built in over time.  They become, in the
> jargon of the book, highly conserved.  The interrelations
> between these sequence are governed by "weak linkages", so it
> is possible for a environmental event or a genetic event or a
> hormonal event to turn on and off whole functionally
> organized cascades of developmental events (OH, THOMPSON,
> BLAH, BLAH, BLAH).  
yep, and another is the possible random walks of neutral traits that in
circumstantial combination with other things happen to suddenly become
non-neutral.  I see those and other plausible large scale impacts of
small changes to be mainly beside the point.  Those don't explain
progressions of change and you require progressions of change to produce
coordinated whole system change.  In other words, you still need a
reason why such large (or any) changes should be biased toward
constructive rather than destructive effect.   Just saying variation
must be biased to the constructive because life exists, a hidden
assertion people seem to me to have always been making, doesn't say for
what mode of variation that applies.

>
> OK, start again.  Think about how a kid learns to ride a
> bicycle.  She already has several highly conserved core
> processes available to her .... balance, cornering, looming
> of objects when going forward,  features of the pedaling
> motion which are similar to running, etc.  The physics of the
> situation also provide many Constance as say, the relation
> between the tilt of the bike and the tendency of the
> handlebars to flop to the right or left.  (somebody PLEASE
> explain to me about angular momentum using very small
> words!).  The kid struggles to assemble the core processes in such a
> way that the bike doesn't fall over.   Given the goal of
> moving forward and
> not falling down, the physics constrains this assemblage to
> certain combinations.... (when you start to feel the bike
> tilt to the right, turn your handle bars to the right.  So
> eventually, the whole mess gets put together in a functional
> passage.  

Yes, but in homeostatic systems all innovation is an exception to the
rules too, leaving the issue back where it started it seems to me.  It's
still the question of how changes that break the rules can be more
creative than destructive.
 
> But was there ever A HABIT of riding a bike (analogous to a
> gene for ....). No, the constraints that make it possible are
> everywhere in the organism and in the environment.  
Now aren't you slipping back into the old idea that all 'habits' of
nature are imbedded in something other than the things that express
them?   That would explain where the expressions come from perhaps,
doesn't work.  I don't mind the observation that rivers flow where the
valleys are, but it gets sticky when you also have to ask if the valleys
then flow where the rivers are.  You need a means of *creating* form,
not just mapping it from one place to another.

>
> In the metaphor above read "falling off the bike" as "death".
>  So the organism can have the dual benefits of a tool box of
> developmental "tools" that remain constant and the
> flexibility in the face variable environments.
Yes, precisely the point, 'tools' that are not prone to random
dysfunction, a conserved organizational core, shielded from variation so
that only successful experiments at the fringe are then later
incorporated.  Put a time dimension on that and it's accumulating
history dependent feedback.   How this process analogy gets connected to
the genetic mechanism remains something of a gap, but the deepest core
process 'tool' necessary seems to me to be to allow runaway divergences
(say beomg toipped by the slope at a turn that teaches you the dangerous
practice of banking rather than sitting bolt upright on a bike) combined
with the reactions to either trap and eliminate such divergences from
the established method(slamming on the brakes and getting off), or
resolving them inventively in new method. (notice there's no template
being impressed into the neutral form here, but alternate choices for
how to resolve a divergence)
 
>
> So it's NOT directed evolution.  its facilitated evolution.  
by variation in a preferential history dependent direction.
 

> I am, by the way,VERY  familiar with the feeling that comes
> when some highly funded Harvard guy gets a book out of
> something that one has been
> struggling with for years.   It's bitter sweet.  Bad side:
> They got the
> word out, not me! Good side  Hooray, the word is finally
> out!!!!  I guess the truth is that we all do our little parts
> in making the zeitgeist happen.  It is characteristic of
> places like Harvard that they eat the cake that others have
> been patiently baking,  

It is absolutely true that messengers are often chosen for their ability
to gloss over the facts where it is polite and politic, but they'd
probably have a lot less to talk about if it wasn't for the jerks
pointing out the functional necessities.  

In talk as well as in nature I don't think you can have order without
suppressing divergence and nor create order without making use of it.

> But would any of us really be happy
> at such a place???  I don't think so. Harvard would say that
> they advance the cause of thought by bringing the Good People
> together where they can do the Best Work. (cf SFI).  We dont
> know, however, what damage is done to the local structures of
> intellectual development when the "good" people are torn from
> them.  It's like rats eating dodo eggs. It makes for
> larger and better rats.  

I'd certainly agree that each strain of the intellectual culture makes
different kinds of valuable contributions.  In every bunch there are
both the apologists and the fomenters, for example, sometimes abiding by
large sets of polite rules for a game of manners, and sometimes more
spirited.   I also think we're mostly all too timid, that there's a
whole lot of people of all stripes who are not being daring enough
within their own disciplines if modern civilization is to survive on
earth, and that the way we're multiplying our global mistakes puts that
in real doubt.  That being said, I've always also been rather impressed
by Harvard in particular for continually supporting interesting and
unfettered new work, and producing less useless verbiage.   Maybe it
just seems to me they're in a position where they really aught to be
abusing the hell out of it and oddly don't.  

Phil
btw, I plugged in the prior subject line in hopes it gets treated as a
thread...

>
> Nick  
>
>
>
>
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 10:55:50 -0500
> > From: "phil henshaw" <pfh at synapse9.com>
> > Subject: [FRIAM] The Plausibility of Life('s confusing arguments)
> > To: "'FRIAM'" <Friam at redfish.com>
> > Message-ID: <006001c747ab$c80b9350$2f01a8c0 at SavyII>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> >
> > I read several of the key arguments in Kirschner &
> Gerhart's book and
> > found both more key confusions to match the tortured syntax of his
> > title, and a silver lining.   On page 12, for example, if
> you discard
> > the social politics and just parse the reasoning, they
> clearly assert
> > that if an explanation could possibly be correct in any one
> case it must
> > therefore be true in all cases.   It's not that I don't
> agree with the
> > politics, it's that it's bad science.
> >  
> > Then in chapter seven, though, they clearly construct a
> mode of positive
> > feedback for evolutionary directed variation.   This is the
> second such
> > proposal I now know of, in addition to my own, and that
> would indeed
> > explain a whole lot that Darwinian style random variation leaves
> > blank. In 1978 I called it "The Unhidden Pattern Of Events"
> (and I've
> > been exploring the possibilities for communicating it ever since!)  
> > They propose that the "conserved processes","'during embryonic
> > development" provide a core of "robustness" because "physiological
> > adaptability suppresses lethality" so that variation at
> that stage is less
> > destructive than creative.  
> >  
> > Their model may seem stated rather vaguely, but these
> things can take
> > several tries.   Still it's quite similar in form and intent to my
> > latest proposal that genetic feedback would be the natural
> result of
> > selection applied to changes in a core & branch developmental
> > structure, allowing the tips of the organizational branches to
> > 'explore' their local peaks and valleys of new possibility.
>  The other
> > one I know of taking this line is Peter Allen's model of change in
> > socio-economic systems (ECO 11/2/06) in which he also
> explains variation as directing a
> > core system to "explore" local pathways of possibilities.  
> The common
> > link is that they all describe somewhat plausible ways in which the
> > variation would be at a developmental fringe of organization and
> > excluded from a core of resolved and stable structure.  
> That's part of
> > what I'd like to publish in my plankton paper anyway, if
> anyone would
> > let a very well constructed independent perspective get through the
> > door.
> >  
> > Some might wonder why there's a struggle to find better ways to
> > explain something that's supposed to have already been
> explained.  The
> > problem with Darwin is the certainty that all evolution
> occurs by only one
> > unsatisfactory means.   Directed selection by itself is
> unsatisfactory
> > because it simply does not make new species.   It makes all kinds of
> > different breeds of any one species, like all the kinds of
> dogs that are
> > still grey wolfs as a species, but they're not new species.   New
> > species are things that may come about by multiple means,
> but frequently
> > by sudden appearances.   For those you need a kind of incremental
> > process that also produces a rapid and coordinated change
> of state, a
> > dynamic process that begins and ends.   Feedback systems,
> by combining
> > directed variation with directed selection, do that
> handily.   I really
> > wish I could find a journal competent in discussing the data of
> > speciation that doesn't abhor the idea that it might involve a
> > transient process!
> >  
> >
> > Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
> > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> > 680 Ft. Washington Ave
> > NY NY 10040                      
> > tel: [phone]                
> > e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
> > explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>