Steve,
Please see "larding" below. Thank you, as always, for your generosity of spirit. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 11:01 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate Nick - I am very glad to note that you are recovering and your scrappiness is properly returning! [NST==>The best cardio rehab is for you-guys to keep annoying me. Thanks for that. <==nst] What's powerful about it? Nothing more than it is such a succinct statement negating the popular fallacious apprehension of the mechanism of evolution, suggesting that there is a causal link between "selection" and "innovation"... the innovation step is in the mutation, but as the quote states clearly, said *innovation* is *preserved* (selected for) by the natural selection mechanism. [NST==>Wait a minute! What is the misapprehension of which you speak? Can you put it explicitly. And, when you say that mutations are "random", what precisely do you mean. Unpredictable? Clearly false. We know quite a lot, I think, about where DNA is vulnerable, and where mutations are likely to occur. <==nst] I think I held this misapprehension for the longest time, in the same way I *still* think of the Sun orbiting around the earth when I have plenty of reason to believe it is the other way around. What is presented to the world by the epigenetic system is not mutations but "hypotheses" about ways to live. And presumably epigenetic systems are shaped by natural selection to produce more or less plausible hypotheses. And what is the "hypothesis generator" in epigenetics? Is it stochastic or deterministic? (and what examples of epigenetics are you thinking of?) Is "plausable" the term you want, or is it more "utilitarian"? [NST==>What exactly do we imagine a "mutation" to be .nothing more or less than a change in one or more letters of the code, or the surprising change in the morphology or behavior of the creature that results? The epigenetic system has to "make" something of the code change. There are gene editing mechanisms and error correction mechanisms, and switches, on and off. Drop one letter of the code and the organism cannot make melanin; but a lot of work has to be done to turn that mishap into a "white bear." <==nst] The randomness is largely notional. I do think that "random" is a very loosey-goosey concept (like so many we call out on this list), but whether the variation is produced by random processes, pseudo-random processes, or merely processes with appropriately broad distribution functions, [NST==>did you complete that thought? I am eager to know where you were going with that sentence.<==nst] I still think you guys are more captured by your model of evolution than by the actual facts of it. I think we (collectively) are guilty of this all of the time, though in the spirit of "all models are wrong, some are useful" I'm not even sure I know what a "model-free" fact might be? [NST==>Oh, no, Steve. WAY too broad a brush. The problem is that you in danger of using the same model to explicate your understanding of the phenomenon of evolution as you later use to explain how evolution came about. <==nst] Facts (to me) imply measurements (qualitative, quantitative) which imply a object of said measurement which in turn implies a model. There was a time, I believe when people felt they held "facts" about "the viscosity of the aether" and the "density of phlogiston". When those models were superseded, those "facts" took on entirely new implications and meaning. - Steve Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Jenny Quillien Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 12:21 PM To: friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate Totally agree. Maybe a few of us can read the Wagener book (apparently he shows up at the Santa Fe institute from time to time as an external something or other) and see what we can do with the ideas. I'll be in Amsterdam but can follow e-mail threads to skype. Jenny On 8/9/2017 10:01 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: Jenny - What a powerful quote: Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. In my own maunderings about the (continued?) relevance of Free Markets and Capitalism, it has occurred to me that the value of said Free Markets may well be restricted to the "innovation phase" of development. Once something becomes a (relative) commodity, it seems it might be counter-productive to continue the illusion of competitive development. At best it is wasteful and even harmful, and at worst it leads to an elevation of "innovation" to marketing and salesmanship. This is why we have so many near-identical products on the market being pushed on us through the hype of greed and fear when the "generic" or "store brand" version is equal or (even) superior (certainly in price, but also possibly in quality... lacking the colorants and odorants and other embellishments required to differentiate one product from the other?). - Steve On 8/9/17 8:56 AM, Jenny Quillien wrote: An excellent foray into such a topic is Arrival of the Fittest: how nature innovates by Andreas Wagner. >From the Preface: the power of natural selection is beyond dispute, but this power has limits. Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. And calling the change that creates them random is just another way of admitting our ignorance about it. Nature's any innovations- some uncannily perfect - call for natural principles that accelerate life's ability to innovate, its innovability. Dave West turned me onto the book and has promised a discussion about how it is relevant to 'evolution' in software. It is certainly relevant to Nick's e-mail. Jenny Quillien On 8/9/2017 8:47 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: Hi everybody, Thanks for your patience as I emerge (hopefully) from post-surgical fog. I figured I best start my own thread rather than gum up yours. First. I had always supposed that a stochastic process was one whose value was determined by two factors, a random factor AND it's last value. So the next step in a random walk is "random" but the current value (it's present position on a surface, say) is "the result of a stochastic process." From your responses, and from a short rummage in Wikipedia, I still can't tell if I am correct or not. Now remember, you guys, my standard critique of your discourse is that you confuse your models with the facts of nature. What is this "evolution" of which you speak? Unless you tell me otherwise, I will assume you are speaking of the messy biological process of which we are all a result: -- The alteration of the design of taxa over time. Hard to see any way in which that actual process is evidently random. We have to dig deep into the theory that EXPLAINS evolution to find anything that corresponds to the vernacular notion of randomness. There is constraint and predictability all over the place in the evolution I know. Even mutations are predictable. In other words, the randomness of evolution is a creation of your imaginations concerning the phenomenon, not an essential feature of the phenomenon, itself. So what kind of "evolution" are you guys talking about? Yes, and forgive me for trolling, a bit. I am trying to wake myself up, here. nick Nicholas S. 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