Following a post from Tyler Cowen I stumble upon Universal Darwinism, which describes its aim as:
Universal Darwinism is the collection of scientific theories which explain design found in the universe as the creation of Darwinian processes.
This site attempts an introduction to this marvellous area of study and the work of some of its most exciting researchers.
It is our hope that the unified scientific view on the wondrous workings of nature revealed by Universal Darwinism may serve the purpose that Einstein envisioned for Science: ‘To awaken the Cosmic Religious Experience and to keep it alive in those receptive to it.’
All well and good, however, its always seemed to me that Darwinism or natural selection was simply as subset of the concept that we observe things which are highly observable, thus the universe will appear to be designed as if for the purpose of being observed.
How could anything else be true?
Natural selection in our world operates through inheritance but inheritance is not necessary for this this to hold. If creatures were simply randomly popping into existence and some where devoured by others and some not, then we would still observe a set of creatures that looked as if was designed not to be devoured.
Why?
Because all the others would have been devoured and thus rendered unobservable.
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Saturday ~ November 6th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
SteveK9
The pressures of natural selection are slight. So, you would not observe creatures that are well-adapted without inheritance. Got it?
Monday ~ November 8th, 2010 at 6:56 am
Critical Thinking
This explanation:
“Because all the others would have been devoured and thus rendered unobservable.”
Is not only not persuasive – it is outright false.
‘Devoured’ species are perfectly well observable. There are fossil records (of pretty much any form of life this planet could conceivably have come up with), and for the past few hundred years we have a written record of observations as well – of now extinct species amongst other things.
The simple fact is that evolution of life is observable in every corner of this planet.
On a side note, most people I’ve seen struggling with the topic of evolution are ones who reject the scientific method for certain categories of problems on some emotional level.
Those who are able to rationally match up facts with scientific explanations have no problem at all with evolution.
The invisible man in the sky is much more elusive – and it’s kind of ironic that those who believe in the invisible man have so much trouble believing their own eyes.
Saturday ~ November 6th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Steve Case
This is exactly what happens in your refrigerator, where eventually salad dressings that nobody really likes and odd ingredients like pickled turnips that you used once tend to accumulate, to the point where it’s full and your 13-year old can stand there looking at it and say there’s nothing to eat.
Saturday ~ November 6th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
sardonic_sob
And then somebody (like me) goes berzerk and flushes the whole thing out except for a few bottles of water and an unopened bottle of ketchup. This is the refrigeration punctured-equilibrium equivalent of a major comet strike.
Saturday ~ November 6th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
jazzbumpa
. . . simply as subset of the concept that we observe things which are highly observable, thus the universe will appear to be designed as if for the purpose of being observed.
Thus reducing life, the universe, and everything to a meaningless tautology. Very impressive, indeed.
Rabbits have been around for a long time – I take this to be a priori evidence of pretty good survival potential, irrespective of mechanism.
Yet, have you ever observe a set of creatures that looked more as if was specifically designed to be devoured.?
I’ll recommend the cow. Too bad they’re extinct.
You usually make sense, Karl. This is absurd.
Cheers!
JzB
Sunday ~ November 7th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
sardonic_sob
Rabbits are in fact designed to be devoured at a certain rate because they’re also designed to reproduce at a certain rate. It’s part of their survival program to be more or less readily edible or they’d eat themselves extinct. And don’t confuse domestic cattle with wild cattle. Aurochs certainly would score low on MY “designed to be devoured” indicator.
Yet they got devoured. (I would rather see a genetically recreated aurochs than a dinosaur, personally. That would be really freaking cool and I wouldn’t have to worry about them going all Jurassic Park on us.)
I’m not really disagreeing with you that looking at things the way the post sets forth is kind of reductionist from a certain point of view. It is. But it’s still good to keep in mind that when you see a system which is working in a certain way, it’s inevitable that its components will usually look as if they were designed to work in the way that they work to make the system function. If they didn’t, we’d have some other system. The trick is to remember at the same time that the system we have is just one of many possibilities and there is no special preference for it.
Sunday ~ November 7th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
jazzbumpa
I was for natural selection before I was against it.
Anyway, my smarmy and terminally trivial point is that survivors do not have to look like they were designed not to be devoured.
Aurochs, for example, provide the opposite story.
Survival comes from either maintained success in a static situation, or successful adaptation in a dynamic situation. In either case, inheritance is the mechanism by which the successful characteristics are maintained across generations.
The preference for the system (inherited characteristics) comes from its effectiveness. If that were not so, then we would have another system. But we don’t.
Cheers!
JzB
Sunday ~ November 7th, 2010 at 10:41 am
Noumenon
Darwinism isn’t supposed to explain why the animals we see are functional, it’s supposed to explain how they got that way.
Monday ~ November 8th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Selected Behavior : Organon
[...] so much that I went to check out his usual digs at Modeled Behavior. There I ran into this little foray into the theory of Darwinism: Natural selection in our world operates through inheritance but inheritance is not necessary for [...]
Monday ~ November 8th, 2010 at 11:49 pm
pjcamp
Nope.
What you are arguing is the strong anthropic principle and it is generally rejected by cosmologists as well as philosophers. Philosophers argue that it is a tautology — essentially, your conclusion is equivalent to your premise. It also tends to requires the existence of conscious life as a necessary prerequisite for the universe to exist. Stephen Jay Gould said it was equivalent to arguing that sausages were made long and narrow so they could fit inside hot dog buns, or that ships were designed to house barnacles.
Life has adapted to physics, not vice versa. The evidence is in the fossil record, in our DNA, and in the imperfections of adaptation that almost all organisms have, from the pelvis of the legless lizard to the teeth that embryonic chickens have and then lose before hatching.
You’re also weak on Darwinian processes. It isn’t just inheritance + selection. There are at least six essential, logically distinct features needed to make it work:
1. There is a characteristic pattern encoding involved (e.g. but not limited to DNA)
2. There must be a means of copying the pattern (indeed, that which may be copied may define the pattern)
3. Variant patterns must somehow be produced by chance
4. The pattern and its variants must compete with one another for a limited work space (note that the body exists merely as a competition machine for the underlying pattern)
5. The competition is biased by environmental influences
6. There is a skewed survival to reproductive maturity or a skewed distribution of successful mating adults
Random critters popping up to be eaten violates most of these. In addition, it would leave no evidence behind, in fossils and the like, of descent with variation.