On 06/12/2007, at 2:56 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: > > > I'm talking about the Santa Fe Institution people and those doing > related > work. Kauffman, Waldrop, Holland, Arthur, Lewin, etc.
Right, now I'm a lot closer to understanding what you're alluding to (but it's the Santa Fe Institute...). I followed the early A-life stuff very carefully, and think that Chris Langton's work is fascinating. Kauffman is very interesting too, but he's got a lot of work to do. I'll discuss it below a bit. > Just looked to see who Dembski is. I guess I need to say clearly > that I am > not nor ever have been a proponent of intelligent design. I find > that whole > idea and movement rather nauseating. It seems to me to be rather > obviously > based in fear, not science. Yes. But when you start saying things like "complexity poses challenges to Darwinian models" without providing examples, you're echoing (inadvertently it seems), one of the major battle cries of the ID "movement". Gets my hackles up, because it's vacuous at best and downright unscientific more likely. > I feel the same way about people who assume > that anybody who is unsatisfied with Darwinian -- natural selection > as the > over-reaching mechanism of speciation -- must be proponents of > intelligent > design. It depends what people are saying. If one actually proposes some other model, then it can be evaluated, and there's a discussion, and we're doing science. But if you look back over the last few posts, you'll see that I've been trying to ask what models you're talking about, and it took several attempts to even get you to even mention some scientists by name. It appeared extremely evasive from where I'm sitting, and that again is a red-flag to pseudoscience. Bear in mind that outside of Brin-L, I spend a lot of time discussing evolutionary biology, and I'm well used to cranks hijacking discussions. People who make sweeping statements without getting involved in specifics are 9 times out of 10 cranks, or at the very least don't know what they're talking about. > It's like it's impossible to engage in debate without first > rejecting the lunatics. Which is what I've been trying to do by asking you exactly what you were alluding to. It's a lot easier to engage in a debate if you actually engage in it. > >> Emergence isn't trivial, it's actually an important insight, one of >> those (like natural selection) that seems so damned obvious in >> hindsight that it's hard to imagine not understanding it. However >> you're right in that pointing out that a system exhibits emergence >> doesn't tell you much about it unless you bother to discover the >> nature of the simple causes and how they generate complex results. > > > I wasn't saying that emergence is trivial. I was saying that it is > trivial > to describe emergence. As I think you're saying, figuring out the > implications of emergence is challenging. There's a lot to be > discovered by > those who can figure out the mathematics that will allow us to model > many > kinds of emergent phenomena, which currently seem to be beyond- > astronomical > in magnitude. Emergence has applications in ecosystems, crowd control, city design, animal behaviour, surveillance, neural nets, and so on. Modelling those systems through a few simple rules is a challenge, but not beyond our capacity. Interestingly, some of the most successful work has come out of games and movies - SimCity exhibits some emergence, and CGI crowd/battle scenes > > > So... perhaps I can answer your question this way... we don't know > much much > of evolution is driven by simple rules that are inherent in the > universe > (thus the anthropic principle) v. how much is driven by competition. Why are those two different things? Evolution as currently accepted *is* driven by simple rules. If you have inheritance and differential breeding rates, that lead to changes in gene prevalence over generations. That's all evolution is. There is a lot in the complexity of ecosystems (or in maintaining simple systems in a stable way) that could be understood and explained by emergence. Especially interesting is actually the pre-evolutionary field of abiogenesis, where hypercycles may turn out to explain how a set of complex interactions of molecules could bootstrap out of the prebiotic chemical soup. Indeed, emergence and hypercycles may go a long way to explaining how biochemical systems like the Krebs cycle could have appeared and been incorporated. Look at one of those huge posters of the human metabolic pathways, and it absolutely screams emergence. Here: http://expasy.org/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl Kauffman argues that the complexity of systems may result as much from emergent phenomena and complexity, non-linear dynamics, maybe chaos, as they do through natural selection. Well yes, they probably do. But I think these are two related but not totally overlapping areas - natural selection explains long-term genetic drift, and emergence and complexity explain a lot of ecosystem dynamics. This is an emerging (heh) field, and he and his colleagues have a lot to do to convince the rest of the field. Thing is, if they're right, they'll be able to show it. > > > Saying it another way... complexity says that the interactions of > lots of > agents gives rise to unpredictable (so far) phenomena. At the > simplest > mathematical levels, it is meaningless to describe those > interactions as > competitive or cooperative, but at higher levels of observation, such > behaviors appear to emerge. Yes. But that's describing behaviour, not evolution (which is simply changes in gene frequencies in a population over time). Now, there's some speculation that DNA has a bit more going on than just a gene carrier: - it's been postulated that interactions of genes can act in a self-organising way, or even as a form of calculating device, a genetic computer. But this is controversial, and it's going to take a lot of work to show this. Interesting line of study, however. Charlie. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
