It seems to me you're still directly on topic. Nick's emphasis on hierarchy leads directly to (forgive me, here) the *flatness* or flattenability of dynamical systems equations versus whatever units multi-level selection might operate over.
It's probably just another fit of apophenia. But I just finished my incompetent reading of McShea and Brandon's "Biology's First Law", wherein they criticize the Hardy-Weinberg "law" (at least as a universal biological law) and, later in the book, assert that their ZFEL is strictly hierarchically applicable. They go on to reference Bouchard 2008 (http://www.fredericbouchard.org/textes/BOUCHARDcausal_persistence_fitnessPHILSCI08.pdf) and say: McShea and Brandon, § A Generalized ZFEL for Physical Systems: > "In this more general understanding, reproduction would be just one route to > persistence, the route biology employs in a world of mortal organisms. It > is a mechanism that increases the probability that a given phenotype in > existence at some time will also be present at some later time. The > organisms die but the lineage persists." This hearkens back to Nick's attempt to paraphrase Rosen with: On 10/25/18 2:55 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > We need a science of biology that is materialistic but NOT mechanistic. > [...] > But if life is an organization of things from another organization, the > question becomes, “What kind of an organization could scaffold the > organization we call life. Rosen specifically targets operational closure and material openness. But McShea and Brandon seem to argue obliquely against that earlier in the book: McShea & Brandon § Forces and Null Expectations: > "... Newman and Müller (2000) have argued that accurate inheritance (...) is > an evolutionary achievement, the result of natural selection, and is not > evolutionarily primitive (...). We agree. But heritability, in the > evolutionarily relevant sense, does not require anything like what Newman and > Müller have in mind. As Griesemer (2000) has emphasized, biological > reproduction involves material transfer; that is, the parent transfers not > simply information, not jut a 'blueprint,' but an actual bit of matter that > used to be parent and that now becomes offspring. ... And this material > transfer ensures some degree, even if low, of fidelity of reproduction." Anyway, there are 2 questions that this apophenic fit lead me to: 1) Are the "higher order" constructs (including your interfering distributions, M&B's "lineages", units of selection, etc.) reducible to "lower order" constructs -- i.e. what I infer as John's implicit assertion that a sequential machine should be able to reproduce *any* chronicle? And 2) Are material and organization *actually* separable or do they always remain at least a tiny bit dependent? Regardless of any of that, though, I'd also appreciate any and all opinions about M&B's ZFEL. In my googling, I failed to find criticisms of it. My skeptical homunculus refuses to remove the handcuffs from my gullible homunculus *until* I find a scathing criticism. On 11/6/18 11:58 AM, Eric Smith wrote: > On 10/29/18 12:25 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote: >> As we've discussed over the last few years, The Action Principle (energy * >> time) and least (stationary) action may provide a more fundamental selection >> principle in biology than natural selection and could be a mathematical >> formulation you're asking for. Many applied problems in complexity like ant >> algorithms using dual pheromone fields, level-set methods, and route search >> on a road network using simultaneous floodflill from both origins and >> destinations might be considered least action path selection. I make the >> claim on intuition - I expect Eric Smith would reject or accept this based >> on more formal understanding. > > I don’t want to just drop this, but I don’t know how to respond to it > usefully. I think of the two (principle of least action (PoLA) and natural > selection (NS)) in completely decoupled thoughts. For me, PoLA in the > classical form is equivalent in content to dynamical equations, but because > it formulates them as an extremization principle it more readily exposes > consequences of symmetry. In quantum mechanics, I can find the same thing as > a stationary-path consequence of interference of phase advances over many > paths. In statistical mechanics I can find a “stochastic effective action” > that captures stationarity through a similar kind of interference, but no > longer among quantum phases, rather in some interaction of distributions with > the shadows of late-time questions we might ask about them. (Sorry that > formulation is so cryptic; for those who prefer that one just show what one > means by calculating, there is this: > https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3938 > ) > > For me, NS comes up in response to a completely different collection of > questions (which may or may not be about the same phenomena). I think of NS > as being about whatever it is that makes time different from just another > dimension of space, so that there is always something falling apart that can > only be maintained by being passed through a filter. I would prefer to use > NS (or maybe, better, “Darwinian selection”) as a subset of the previous > general sentence, to refer to phenomena that are organized in architectures > of individuals and populations, as distinct from simple kinetic phenomena in > general. Of course one does not have to draw the boundary there, but I find > it a good way to use a new word to distinguish individual/population-based > phenomena from general kinetic organization, for which we have other terms > already. Also NS is about information in the same sense (exactly) as > Bayesian filtering is about information. Sometimes effects of any of these, > as they act in populations, can be expressed in terms of actions, but I don’t > think of the service that action gives in displaying the nature of a > calculation as being the same thing as NS does in declaring what kinds of > phenomena we are talking about. > > Sorry I could not offer better, or more likely I am not understanding where > the conversation is. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
