What We All Got Wrong
Sat Feb 13 03:04:51 GMT 2010 by Wade Schuette
Comments on "Survival of the fittest theory", New Scientist, 6 Feb 2010 p28
Comments on "Survival of the fittest theory", New Scientist, 6 Feb 2010 p28
Moving to Darwin was a hard paradigm shift, and now moving beyond Darwin will similarly be attacked and wrongly stereotyped as regression, and lumped as fanaticism and enemy action. It is as if the US Congress's protocol ("never yield on anything") is controlling our models instead of rational and civil discussion.
What I see is brash decrees of what is "obvious" on both sides, by people who can't even analyze or predict the simplest multi-level feedback loop.
There are battles between "the genes do it" or "the animals do it" or "the species do it" and very little interest in the far more likely reality -- they all do it, and simultaneously, bidirectionally, filled with feedback loops on multiple scales of time and space.
"Science" has great power for open-loop systems and equations, but almost no tools or reliable insights on complex closed-loop systems.
What is clear is that humans are somewhere in the middle of a hierarchy of living control systems where cells have some life of their own, organs have some life of their own, individual humans have some life of their own, aggregate human clusters such as corporations and nations and cultures have some life of their own, etc. It's a mess computationally and totally unjustifiable to "simplify" it by tossing out that aspect of it.
[ Added note by author: As we were taught at Johns Hopkins, it is becoming clear that the impact of "psychosocial" factors on what has classically been called "biomedical health" is at least as large, if not larger, than "biological" factors. As we open our eyes to such pathways, they are starting to show up everywhere. How can anyone say that policy decisions at the national level about health care funding do not, ultimately, alter the "fitness" landscape and inflluence, perhaps heavily, who lives, who dies, and who has children?
Or take the state of the "national economy" and "the stock market", which are aggregate entities with a very powerful influence on the odds that human cells will be exposed to "unusual" levels of alcohol these days, let alone the immune-suppressing impact of "depression" on multiple spatial scales. It's all tangled together, bidirectionally. It goes upwards as well: a single fatigued, depressed , and drunk person, attempting to do something stupid on an airplane, can change the entire behavior of an entire country. These are very real intra-life-form interactions that cross many orders of magnitudes in scale. You can't ignore them because of some legacy political decision about what constitutes "alive" or "life". ]
On top of that, the increasingly dominant organized life-form on the planet, aka "corporations", can not only replicate and divide and reproduce, they can also "merge".
And, to boot, they can modify their internal operations and structure, in close to real-time, based not just on the past, but on observations about the present and even predictions of future conditions.
If you believe, as I do, in some kind of hierarchical, scale-invariant symmetry and invariance of the mathematics of key control-loops, the implication is clear -- EVERY level of life has some capacity to adapt its own internal structure and what it propagates based on current events, not just past discrete, acute "reproductive" events.
Given the empirical behavior of the parts of the world we can see around us every day, and read about in the paper, and our almost total inability to model complex feedback systems, I can't see any "scientific" justification for boldly ruling out such aspects of life based on their political and religious ramifications.
Life appears to be self-catalyzing, and there is as much downward pressure on the direction of the planet from meta-organisms (e.g. corporations, religions, terrorists) as there is upwards pressure from genetics and emergence.
In the US a corporation has announced plans, on top of it's constitutional right of free speech, to run for office of the President.
Seems like the definition of "alive" needs some tweaking, even before the computer network sits up and asks for the vote as well.
And, if downward pressure on evolution, to force it in certain directions, is an aspect of the nature of LIFE (and it is in the only case we know about), then, in the limit, regardless how unpopular, it is not credible to discount all reports, however distorted, of "direction" on evolution around us, and, "from above."
Take where we are and add a billion years.
It seems the question shouldn't be is there intervention in evolution from "above", but what the nature of that intervention, today, is.
Maybe I've missed something in the last few decades, but I'm unaware that science has calibrated and reliable equipment to measure even, say, CIA intervention in country X, let alone much larger- scale, longer-term and perhaps less-obvious tilts to the evolutionary playing field.
What I see is brash decrees of what is "obvious" on both sides, by people who can't even analyze or predict the simplest multi-level feedback loop.
There are battles between "the genes do it" or "the animals do it" or "the species do it" and very little interest in the far more likely reality -- they all do it, and simultaneously, bidirectionally, filled with feedback loops on multiple scales of time and space.
"Science" has great power for open-loop systems and equations, but almost no tools or reliable insights on complex closed-loop systems.
What is clear is that humans are somewhere in the middle of a hierarchy of living control systems where cells have some life of their own, organs have some life of their own, individual humans have some life of their own, aggregate human clusters such as corporations and nations and cultures have some life of their own, etc. It's a mess computationally and totally unjustifiable to "simplify" it by tossing out that aspect of it.
[ Added note by author: As we were taught at Johns Hopkins, it is becoming clear that the impact of "psychosocial" factors on what has classically been called "biomedical health" is at least as large, if not larger, than "biological" factors. As we open our eyes to such pathways, they are starting to show up everywhere. How can anyone say that policy decisions at the national level about health care funding do not, ultimately, alter the "fitness" landscape and inflluence, perhaps heavily, who lives, who dies, and who has children?
Or take the state of the "national economy" and "the stock market", which are aggregate entities with a very powerful influence on the odds that human cells will be exposed to "unusual" levels of alcohol these days, let alone the immune-suppressing impact of "depression" on multiple spatial scales. It's all tangled together, bidirectionally. It goes upwards as well: a single fatigued, depressed , and drunk person, attempting to do something stupid on an airplane, can change the entire behavior of an entire country. These are very real intra-life-form interactions that cross many orders of magnitudes in scale. You can't ignore them because of some legacy political decision about what constitutes "alive" or "life". ]
On top of that, the increasingly dominant organized life-form on the planet, aka "corporations", can not only replicate and divide and reproduce, they can also "merge".
And, to boot, they can modify their internal operations and structure, in close to real-time, based not just on the past, but on observations about the present and even predictions of future conditions.
If you believe, as I do, in some kind of hierarchical, scale-invariant symmetry and invariance of the mathematics of key control-loops, the implication is clear -- EVERY level of life has some capacity to adapt its own internal structure and what it propagates based on current events, not just past discrete, acute "reproductive" events.
Given the empirical behavior of the parts of the world we can see around us every day, and read about in the paper, and our almost total inability to model complex feedback systems, I can't see any "scientific" justification for boldly ruling out such aspects of life based on their political and religious ramifications.
Life appears to be self-catalyzing, and there is as much downward pressure on the direction of the planet from meta-organisms (e.g. corporations, religions, terrorists) as there is upwards pressure from genetics and emergence.
In the US a corporation has announced plans, on top of it's constitutional right of free speech, to run for office of the President.
Seems like the definition of "alive" needs some tweaking, even before the computer network sits up and asks for the vote as well.
And, if downward pressure on evolution, to force it in certain directions, is an aspect of the nature of LIFE (and it is in the only case we know about), then, in the limit, regardless how unpopular, it is not credible to discount all reports, however distorted, of "direction" on evolution around us, and, "from above."
Take where we are and add a billion years.
It seems the question shouldn't be is there intervention in evolution from "above", but what the nature of that intervention, today, is.
Maybe I've missed something in the last few decades, but I'm unaware that science has calibrated and reliable equipment to measure even, say, CIA intervention in country X, let alone much larger- scale, longer-term and perhaps less-obvious tilts to the evolutionary playing field.
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