For a long time it's been clear that Darwinian Natural Selection and random mutation-based Evolution couldn't be the whole story. For one thing, progress is too quick for the process to be purely random; there has to be something informing what kinds of mutations arise, not just a brute-force extinction mechanism to wipe out nonadaptive ones. Likewise there are examples like the multiple evolutions of crabs (five separate times we know of). Something must be guiding the process along lines that make a kind of sense.
Today I see that scientists have proposed an answer to this problem.
[N]ine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more.
It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.
"We see evolution as a universal process that applies to numerous systems, both living and nonliving, that increase in diversity and patterning through time," said Carnegie Institution for Science mineralogist and astrobiologist Robert Hazen....
Titled the "law of increasing functional information," it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist - such as cellular mutation - that generate many different configurations. Evolution occurs, it holds, when these various configurations are subject to selection for useful functions.
It's going to take a while to see if this holds water, as is the way with the scientific method. The problem they're treating is real enough, though, so it's good to see them trying out a new theory.
There are a number of second and third order questions that will arise if it does. It's going to have implications for the Fermi Paradox, for example. Of greater interest to me, it has implications for panpsychism and other questions around 'the hard problem' of consciousness.
Self-design?
ReplyDeleteIt's coherent: life is a self-ordering process, defined (by philospher Hans Jonas) as the process of taking things from the world (like calcium or sugar or protein) and putting them into the order that is also you. So why wouldn't there also be another, higher-order process of designing the order that would then be implemented? And, then, natural selection tests it.
ReplyDeleteThis will be interesting!
ReplyDeleteI recommend Tom Stoppard's 1988 one-act play "The Hard Problem." He puts flesh on the question. Playwrights seldom know enough math or science to include them, and when they attempt philosophy it is usually shallow. But Stoppard actually knows a good deal of this, at least in part "Hapgood" relies on the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg for its plot, "Arcadia" plays with chaos theory and time travel. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21l-703-studies-in-drama-stoppard-and-company-spring-2014/
ReplyDeleteThis is merely an extension of Darwin’s theory of natural/sexual/group selection to other sciences.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn’t say that, unless indeed you are building in a choosing mechanism analogous to the one that animals have. Otherwise, this implies a very different model — certainly from the Newtonian universe Darwin was living in.
ReplyDelete