Evolution
Complex Systems Concept Summary
I figured it was time for a reset and so the following is a summary of much of the foundational posting that I’ve done on this blog so far. As always, a work in progress, subject to refinement and learning……
Cancer Research Surprises
Many people would admit to not understanding cancer well, but fewer people would admit to not understanding evolution well. Here are some challenges to our understanding of both.
Starvation may help cancer treatment. “As little as 48 hours of starvation afforded mice injected with brain cancer cells the ability to endure and benefit from extremely high doses of chemotherapy that non-starved mice could not survive.”
What is a Gene?
Not having had any serious biological training I have to go to Wikipedia and Google to learn the basics. And I’m often surprised to find that concepts everyone uses don’t have good consensus amongst scientists. When reading the Wikipedia entry for “gene”, it occurs to me that if the concept didn’t predate the discovery of DNA, it would not exist.…
Alex Ryan's Diagram
Click here to enlarge.
I have spent a lot of time on this blog discussing evolution and emergence, the distinction between the two and the interplay thereof. All the while I have wished that I had a diagram like like Alex Ryan‘s above (posted with permission), as it does much better then the proverbial thousand words.…
Evolution Favors Cooperation Over Competition
There is a myth in evolutionary biology, as well as in the zeitgeist, that evolution by natural selection is all about competition.…
Genotype, Phenotype, Schmenotype
The distinction between “genotype” and “phenotype” is an artificial one that obfuscates understanding past a certain point. As Dawkins points out in his selfish gene argument, from the standpoint of the gene, the gene is the phenotype and the organism is the genotype. This is not to say that we should go overboard and anoint the gene as supreme. “Genotype” and “phenotype” are concepts. From a complex system’s standpoint, they are two frozen snapshots (stages) in an ongoing autocatalytic cycle. Other stages between could be singled out and studied (e.g. ontogenesis), but we are not good at conceptualizing dynamic processes and prefer to look at relatively stable forms. We forget that these stable forms are a part of the autocatalytic process, which is ongoing.…
The Logical Necessity of Group Selection
There has been a long-standing debate about the notion of group selection, the idea that populations of organisms can be selected for en masse over competing populations. The Darwinian “purists” claim that natural selection (NS) only acts at the level of individuals. But if that’s true, then how can multicellular organisms be subject to NS? After all what are multicellular organisms if not a group of single cell organisms?…
Types of Emergence
Stability can be thought of as a measure of agency. That is, the more stable a system is, the better we are able to recognize it as a distinct agent, a system that actively, structurally or by happenstance persists through time, space and/or other dimensions. Burton Voorhees defines a concept of virtual stability as a “state in which a system employs self-monitoring and adaptive control to maintain itself in a configuration that would otherwise be unstable.” He clarifies that virtual stability is not the same as stability or metastability and gives formal definitions of all three.* By making a distinction between stability, metastability and virtual stability, we can gain further clarity on agency itself and the emergence of new agents and new levels of organization.…
Cooperation and Competition
It is well-understood that the primary relationship between agents in an evolutionary system is that of competition for resources: food, mates, territory, control, etc. It is also recognized that agents not only compete but also cooperate with one another, sometimes simultaneously, for instance hunting in packs (cooperation) while also fighting for alpha status within the pack (competition). If we look at inter-agent behaviors as existing on a continuum of pure competition on one end and pure cooperation* on the other, it is clear that there is broad range both within species and between agents of different species. Originally, cooperative behavior was explained away as an exception to the general competitive landscape and happened only when two agents shared enough genetic code (such as between parent and child) that cooperation could be seen as a form of genetic selfishness. While this true in a narrow sense, it misses the larger point which is that cooperation between any two or more agents can confer advantages to all …
Generalized Evolutionary Theory
Over the years evolutionary theory has itself evolved to encompass new and more disciplines: social Darwinism, genetic algorithms, co-evolution of biology and culture, evolutionary psychology, economics, psychoanalysis, and more. Attempts to formalize evolution typically have focused on several elements or preconditions for natural selection:
- a POPULATION of individual agents
- a REPRODUCTION mechanism
- a MUTATION mechanism that yields differential fitness of agents
- a SELECTION mechanism which favors highly fit agents over others for reproduction
Agency
To understand the concept of agency and emergence thereof, it helps to think about very pure systems that exhibit agency emergence. One such system is Conway’s Game of Life, a kind of cellular automata system which exhibits some uncanny life-like behaviors. You should read the synopsis of Life as well as watch various simulations of it unfold so you get an understanding and an intuition about what’s happening. A remarkable aspect of Life that the rules that govern everything that happens in the system are extremely simple and only apply to a local neighborhood on a grid. What emerges as a run of Life unfolds could hardly be called simple though.…
Evolution & Emergence
Evolution and emergence are not the same thing. Evolution is the process of change within a particular level. Emergence is the creation of a new level of organization through the coming into existence of one or more self-sustaining systems, or agents. These agents often co-exist in populations of other agents which are more or less similar to one another, for instance a species, a tribe, or an ecology of organisms from a variety of species.…