The Plausibility of Life('s confusing arguments)

[phil henshaw]

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                       ????.?? ? `?.????
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