I'd like to focus a bit on the categorical distinction: description vs
mechanism.
One of my favorite concepts is from Art Burks' (von Neumann's) Theory of Self-Reproducing
Automata: "I am twisting a logical theorem a little, but it's a perfectly good
logical theorem. It's a theorem of Gödel that the next logical step, the description of
an object, is one class type higher than the object and is therefore asymptotically [?]
infinitely longer to describe."
If this were true (I believe it!), then there's something "dead" (or "thin", or "flat", or any of a
dozen other tokens) about descriptions ... something they can't describe. It's a recurrent itch (like from skin cancer or
something) that was triggered this morning by the DtG guys criticizing Gary Stevenson w.r.t. his abdication of "graphs and
data" (cf https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/a-return-to-gary-world). At about hour 2, they discuss
"dumbing things down". And similar to Hilary's two positions, one private, one public, Gary's argument is right.
As toxic as demagogues like Trump are, it's both a pragmatic and perhaps in
principle fact that descriptions cannot be mechanisms, or at least the
mechanistic effect of a description cannot be entirely faithful to the
mechanism(s) it describes. You can't really coerce every single one of your
acolytes into truly understanding some complex subject so that they'll come
around and give you the political will you need to, e.g., shut down the
government or Eat the Rich.
Yes, I know. It sounds like all I'm saying is "the map is not the territory"
yaddayadda. But I'm trying to get at formalization and the ontological status of
formalisms. The enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend; they're merely analogous to a friend,
of instrumental and ephemeral use. The same *might* be true of any logic we extrude
biology through.
It's in this context, I discovered these 2 papers:
Thermodynamics of evolution and the origin of life
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2120042119
Toward a theory of evolution as multilevel learning
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2120037119
Claude's zombie assessment rings true to me:
"While intellectually stimulating, this work appears more like theoretical
physics applied to biology rather than a biologically-grounded evolutionary theory.
The mathematical sophistication doesn't compensate for the lack of biological detail
and empirical validation. Most evolutionary biologists would likely view this as an
interesting but ultimately unconvincing attempt to replace well-established,
empirically-supported theory with an abstract mathematical framework.
The real test would be whether this approach generates novel, testable predictions
that advance our understanding beyond current evolutionary theory. So far, that case
has not been made convincingly."
But I would love to hear the thoughts from you live intelligences.
On 8/9/25 2:36 PM, Santafe wrote:
[... violently snipped for capricious reasons ...]
Here I would now make a category distinction: Replication is a _mechanism_ —
meaning: a particular architecture for sequences of events — that can subsume
part of the event-organization in reproductive processes.
Reproduction is a class of object-generation processes, any one of them
employing events jointly carried out within many interacting architectures, and
realizable by many differently-organized overall processes.
The two words are not substitutes for one another.
[ ... ]
2. A summary statistic is a quantity that can be computed from each realized instance of some population process — WITHOUT REFERENCE TO ANY CAUSAL MODEL FOR THE PROCESS, AND FOR EACH TYPE WITHOUT REFERENCE TO ANY OF THE OTHER TYPES. The mess of not getting these categories straight has led to a standard language among selectionists that distinguishes “realized fitness” (meaning, the summary statistic) from “the propensity interpretation” (meaning a set of parameters in an imputed generating model) —
[ ... ]
3. If some replication mechanism exists, we would certainly expect that any
hierarchy of nested reproductive cycles (and non-cycles, which aren’t strictly
“re-productive”, but can still be “productive”) to make use of the replication
mechanism to aid the robustness of the whole tower, and simplify its demands on
information-retaining control systems.
— NOTE: Point 3 is big in my world: being an entropy-kind-of-guy, one of my
premises is that things that aren’t _easy enough_ and _robust enough_ to do, to
enable you to mostly complete them in a world of noise, disruption, and
interruption, end up not characterizing the world we live in. There is way
more causal understanding to be extracted from quantifying the
robustness-conferring roles of these things at the small scale, as the source
of our observed phenomena, than we have yet made use of; so lots of areas for
good work yet to be done.
4. The replicator abstraction presumes an enormous amount of structured context
that it does not itself in any way give an account for. The abstraction isn’t
even set up to provide such accounts, so to speak of its “failing” to do so is
close to a non-sequitur; it isn’t even “about” that context.
5. So to think you are going to have a “theory of evolution” — meaning: some
encompassing theory of whatever variety of causation it is that we want to call
distinctively “evolutionary” and not already subsumed in one of our
previously-formalized notions of cause” — built just out of the abstraction of
replicators, is to be so negligent about categories as to be almost silly.
Let me say this in a little more everyday way that people seem to think must
not matter because it is so anodyne. Corn plants and people reproduce.
Neither of them replicates. (I will let you find the place online where one of
my colleagues stood on a stage and said that she can’t replicate by herself,
she needs her husband’s help to do that.) Yet when corn plants reproduce, they
make new corn plants; and people produce new people. There is no “gene for
being a corn-plant” or “gene for being a person”. Nor any allelic variation
that can cause offspring, stochastically, to sometimes come out as corn plants
and sometimes as people. Even scientists have not been so demented as to claim
or imply such possibilities.
So if you want to do evolutionary biology, you need concept terms and good
categories for whatever it is that generates all these higher-order “types”
(corn-plants, people, etc.) which are plenty stable and identifiable, even if
they have odd variations in the tails of their distributions, and toward which
the concept of replicator is simply irrelevant; its work is elsewhere in the
event architecture.
And then, if you want to look at other kinds of patterns —including but not limited to “groups” thought of as collectives of “objects”; though I would say that the pattern of relations and stereotyped events is every bit as much an attribute of the group as its object-membership — you can ask what kinds of categories you need to talk about their cascades of production. Being a little analogistic, just as the cycles of reproduction can make use of replication within the architectures to tidy up much of the organization, the cascades of ongoing “production” (a.k.a. open-ended evolution) can make heavy use of the stereotyped re-production within lifecycles as a robust central tendency to carry and maintain much of its order. It’s not one kind of thing. It’s as rich as the whole biosphere. There can be recurring motifs that we see at work, and they are good to recognize. But there is also room for enormous novelty across cases, because the combinatorics is very large and
leaves room for many different versions to survive and matter.
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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