Rough seas ahead for US and everyone else

Dear Bernard,

I believe that the most important fundamental differences between the American Founders’ times and our current times are twofold:

• Now, anyone can communicate effectively instantly with anyone else anywhere, even with people who are floating in an orbiting space station or walking on the moon.
• Now, anyone can travel across an entire continent in a few hours and around the entire planet in a day or two.

Our America system of government – local plus states plus federal – was and is predicated, however, on inability to communicate rapidly, and on inability to travel rapidly across a county much less across the whole country or continent. We have a localized, deeply hierarchical, paper-driven system of government that was designed to run methodically and well under 1775 conditions: borough/town/city, county, state, federal.

The first major disruptions of the American system came around the time of our Civil War with trains and telegraph, bringing comparatively rapid travel and near-instant communication across long distances. But these tied together only a few places on any one continent, those connected by rails and/or by cables. Transatlantic telegraph cables were first laid down just after the Civil War.

Nearly a century later, in the 1950s, routine air travel for all became near-supersonic. In the 1970s faxing and single-purpose electronic networks emerged, for example ARPANET. Around 1997 communication became 100% instant for everyone on the planet via the web and generalized email.

We are at most a few decades into an extraordinary acceleration of human movements and inter-human communications, orders of magnitude faster than ever before. We are changing faster and faster. No one can reliably and accurately predict where these extreme changes will take us.

Today’s humanity wobbles between the old and the new. Smaller governmental entities try to maintain and continue their historical functions such as voter qualification, ordinances, legal processes, political districting, driver’s licenses and so forth. But the larger world crashes into them daily. Communities become more and more virtual as opposed to physical. I communicate far more with distant people (like you) than with my next-door neighbors. People of all persuasions and beliefs connect with each other remotely, leading sometimes to bizarre and previously all-but-impossible actions like January 6. Humanity is flocculating, splintering into groupings of all kinds and manners, good and bad, purposeful and purposeless, dangerous and benign.

I’m afraid that we’re in for massive and often deadly convulsions for the foreseeable future.

What do you think will become of us Sapiens?

Wayne

Badly Chosen Words About Evolution Do Real Damage

Was Dr. Chan wrong? That depends on what she meant.

The term “adapt” applied to evolution means for an organism, or population of organisms, to adjust or to change in response to something in the surroundings. That something could have been present all the time, or it might have recently emerged. Humanity didn’t recently emerge. Thus Dr. Chan must have meant that the virus somehow changed to reach a state in which it would turn out to be highly transmissible among humans. Reaching that state did not need human intervention to happen.

Here’s the crux. We humans adapt self-awarely and with purpose. We humans routinely map or project this purposefulness on non-self-aware life-forms like dogs and viruses. This is a problem. This is why Dr. Chan is being attacked. She almost certainly didn’t mean self-awarely, or that humans had self-awarely cultivated and created the specific adaptation.

Dogs are not self-aware to the degree humans are. A dog will usually learn to act in particular ways based on the rewards or punishments its master delivers. But not all dogs do: harsh biters that don’t stop attacking are normally culled or put to sleep. A learned behavior is a true adaptation, but it need not be purpose-driven. The dog doesn’t self-awarely seek to please its master. It seeks to be fed and not be punished.

Covid did not self-awarely adapt to become transmissible among humans. It did not learn to be transmissible. Like all other viruses and all other DNA-based life, it varied and still varies during each new generation of replication/reproduction. The details of these variations are not predictable. Most come from RNA transcription errors, which ultimately come from slight variations in protein foldings, which in turn come from quantum oscillations. We humans often call such errors “mutations”. We label them as “random”, meaning that we cannot predict them and that they typically are able to go in any feasible direction.

It’s certainly possible that Covid happened to evolve to be highly transmissible among humans even before it ever infected a human. But it clearly did not adapt itself ahead of time for the purpose of infecting lots of humans. And it’s extremely unlikely that humans engineered it purposefully. How could they test it to know they’d succeeded? They probably would have had to infect many actual people in order to know.

Dr. Chan is a victim of bad language, bad habits of thought and expression about evolution. She didn’t invent these ways of writing and speaking. She should not be scolded or condemned for using them. Instead, we all should clean up our habits of thought and expression about evolution, our anthropomorphic cuteness that misleads and can cause real damage, as here. This is my project. I think it’s important. I suspect that Dr. Chan does too.

Re Moran’s Sandwalk: Is the Modern [Evolutionary] Synthesis effectively dead?

https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2021/06/is-modern-synthesis-effectively-dead.html

Dear Bernard,

You sent me the above link to Lawrence Moran’s recent blog entry, for which thanks. Here again, though, the hotter the rant, the more confusion inflicted on the reader. So many buzzwords and vague allusions! No definitions, no explicit reasoning, just academic jousting. So much complication, yet the core facts of evolution of life as we know it are so simple.

A revolution in thinking and expression about evolution will eventually occur. I cannot myself drive it because I’m just one layperson with no credentials and no reasonable way to broadcast the message effectively. But the revolution will occur. And it will look like the following.

• Life as we know it is a digital/discrete phenomenon. Because the genome is discrete, an organism once launched into the world cannot fundamentally change. But the world and universe change unpredictably all the time: time is change. Thus each organism must eventually die, because its environment will have changed too much. Therefore, for life to continue and persist, organisms must reproduce. But reproduction must always be at least slightly imperfect, else lineages will not continue to vary in the face of their always-unpredictably-varying environments. As Darwin put it, life must include descent with modification. But what modification(s)? Because the directions of change cannot be predicted, only undirected modifications can/will succeed over time. Beyond just being undirected, modifications must typically be uniformly distributed across all possible variations for each trait. All these aspects are beautifully realized by organic chemistry, random mutations, meiotic sexual recombination, and unicellular lateral gene transfer. Below these strata lie quantum oscillations and the rest of physics. Nothing more need be known or labelled.
   
  But humans invent names and fuzzy concepts willy-nilly. The airwaves are clogged with this stuff, this fluff. All of the following arise from people sensing/feeling/touching aspects of the elephant that is evolution of life on our planet: Genetic drift. Spandrels. Natural selection. Adaptation. Niche development. Punctuated equilibria. Fitness (the worst!). Fixation. Neutral theory. Macroevolution. Microevolution. Adaptive landscapes (second worst!). And many more.
   
  Yes, the universe is most likely non-algorithmic. But life as we know it amounts to discrete mathematics embodied, thus it’s purely algorithmic, and its algorithm – like AlphaZero’s – is the Monte Carlo method, in effect randomized trial-and-error. I encourage you to read Stephen Wolfram’s pages about cellular automata and biological evolution, freely available online here.

I don’t mean to be personally rude and testy about Sandwalk and the like. I do feel that, nearby, there’s a far better world of discourse about these matters. And I hope it emerges soon. I’m doing whatever I can to help it debut. 

Wayne

Life in the Integers

Life as we know it is a digital, discrete, integer-based phenomenon in an otherwise continuous, analog real world. Each organism’s DNA molecule can be represented as an integer, typically an enormous one, that is almost certainly unique among all life-form DNA molecules that have ever existed or ever will exist.

As an aside, one way to do this would be to encode bases G, C, A and T in binary as, say, 00, 01, 10 and 11, so the string GACCGT would map to 001001010011, which equals the integer 595 in decimal. To distinguish 5′ from 3′ ordering, either one more bit would be needed, or the convention could be always to use the 5′ order. The smallest currently-living DNA has about 160,000 base-pairs, thus its representation would have about 320,000 binary digits – a truly huge integer, incomprehensibly larger than the number of subatomic particles in the whole universe. But still a humbly finite integer, tiny in the infinite sea of integers. Human DNA has about 3 billion bases.

DNA molecules replicate themselves with fantastic fidelity – a mistake about once in every billion ladder-rung base pairs – but, crucially, not with 100% fidelity. And out of that tiny percentage shortfall comes evolution, endless change, which is driven also by random mutations (damage from gamma rays and such) and, again crucially, by genetic recombination/shuffling during descent with modification.

Cloning during descent always fails sooner rather than later, because the environment is always changing unpredictably. All evolution is co-evolution: every lineage must change within an ever-changing context.

At the level of life, nothing is ever constant or unchanging. Discrete, integer-based phenomena exhibit far more complexity, pound for pound, than do continuous, analog phenomena. See for example Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science regarding cellular automata as universal models. Even very small and simple rules can generate arbitrarily complex, unpredictable, non-repeating patterns. DNA seen as a computing entity is Turing-complete, maximally powerful.

A mountain range cut in two by a vertical lava dike remains a mountain range. A cell cut in two must die, because life, to be life, must remain integral else perish. To be alive – for life as we know it – is to be separated from the rest of the universe by a semi-permeable, fully-enclosing membrane through which energy is being exchanged both ways (Schroedinger 1943).

Some incoming energy, in the form of matter, can be damaging, like Covid-19. The only feasible mode of defense, a mode which can persist through long stretches of time and many generations, is uniformly randomized production of antibodies, some of which might turn out to be just the right ones to disable this particular damaging influx. But others of which might turn out to be toxic to one’s own life form, via an auto-immune storm.

Subtractive “Adaptation” and Co-Evolution

Varying reproductive outcomes – also known as “natural selection” – lead to changes in individual traits and characteristics across a population. These changes arise from two sources: varying genomes and varying developmental histories.

Suppose twins with identical DNA get separated at birth. Suppose one receives plenty of nourishment and a kind and caring upbringing, while the other is starved of both food and love. Their reproductive outcomes could certainly differ, not due to DNA but rather due to their differing surroundings and circumstances. They were apparently equally “fit” at birth. But they already differed at birth: they had gestated in different locations or orientations inside the womb, and one of them was born before the other and therefore is technically the older. Each exists outside the other’s enveloping membrane, inside the other’s surroundings and circumstances, inside the other’s environment.

No two things, living or not, are 100% identical. In fact, the identical twins’ DNA almost certainly differed in at least one base pair (out of about 3 billion total) because of an unrepaired DNA replication error or because of a mutation from radiation or chemicals. Chances are that such a tiny difference will have no effect – but it could have arbitrarily large consequences, maybe lifelong brilliance, or maybe early death. This is the very definition of complexity: tiny differences or changes can cause radically different results. Usually they don’t, but they can. No one can predict with certainty, except in highly negative cases such as known-critical defects in certain genes.

Suppose the older twin had the positive early life and had healthy children, but the younger had no children. Suppose also that the twins’ genomes did differ at least slightly, almost certainly the case. After the twins’ lives have played out, the population will have changed in its overall genetic composition: something in the older twin’s DNA was passed on, while something in the younger’s disappeared.

The crucial question is this: Did adaptation occur with these twins? Before an answer, some discussion.

Things absolutely could have gone a different way. The blessed older twin might have had no children while the challenged younger did – probably you’ve known a “can’t miss” young star who came to little good, while a plucky little misfit did great. Or neither might have succeeded with children, or both might have. No one can predict reliably accurately at the start, even knowing every minute detail of the genome, every exact base pair, again except for highly negative instances. Why can we not predict? Because no one can reliably predict the details of the always-changing surroundings and circumstances, and no can accurately predict individual trajectories through them.

All evolution is co-evolution. Everything is always changing.

Informally, to “adapt” means to change in some way that achieves a better fit with the environment or the situation. Formally, it means a percentage change, across a population, in the frequency of some variant – some allele – of a particular gene that has led to more successful reproduction by organisms that have that variant.

We self-aware, spatially-cognizant, book-reading, forward-looking humans make plans to adapt, to change our persons or our groups or environments. Sometimes we succeed. We can proactively adapt. But to the best of our knowledge, no other life can proactively adapt through imagination, planning, executing and monitoring. Maybe chimpanzees and bonobos can, and maybe some birds can, but even if so it seems their behaviors are more fully instinctual, less based on persistent knowledge, and less self-aware than our behaviors.

So: No adaptation occurred with the twins. Not in the informal sense anyway.

The older twin did not adapt. The twins’ population did not adapt. The only thing that happened was that the younger twin did not have children, and therefore some of his/her DNA was subtracted from the population’s pool.

Carry this reasoning through generations of any kind of life. In no (non-human) cases do individual organisms proactively adapt genetically. Populations seem to adapt, but that’s an illusion built from our own inner experiences. We observe what seems to be adaptation by other organisms. Adaptation exists in our minds, not in life itself. Populations and individuals do tend to improve in a slow-changing environment, to increase in fitness, to become faster or smarter or differently colored. But any such improvement might come with a hidden cost, like higher malaria resistance with vulnerability to sickle-cell anemia. The faster cheetah differentially does usually tend to get more prey and to feed her cubs better than the slower one, resulting in differential reproduction. But maybe her eyesight was compromised at the same time, so she didn’t get more prey after all. No single trait or characteristic by itself is the full and final word, except when it is severely negative and unconditionally subtractive. Beyond these we can make only statistical statements, verifiable only in hindsight.

“Natural selection” and “adaptation” are both subtractive.

Neither can be predicted reliably accurately, especially not by organisms progressing through life. “Fitness” is a statistical measure of what happened in the past. Many have addressed the tautology of Herbert Spencer’s concept of “survival of the fittest,” notably Ernst Mayr in his discussions of teleology versus teleonomy. What survives? The fittest. What does it mean to be fit? To survive. But, of course, survival is not the actual criterion – successful reproduction of viable and fertile offspring is. Life as we know it is always mortal. So far, life has been sufficiently recursive, via descent with modification, to continue. But the only guarantee we have is that eventually it will end.

You and Your Egg Meet Again

Imagine peeling a hard-boiled egg. You crack it on a hard edge and use your fingernail to pry open the shell. Just under the shell and around the entire white of the egg stretches a thin membrane, which can be tough. To peel quickly and smoothly, some people sweep a thumb’s skin gently sideways, to coax away large sections of the shell along with attached sections of membrane, leaving a glossy and unbroken white. Using a nail instead of skin can tend to break away small pieces of shell, each with attached membrane fragments and messy chunks of white. Many variable factors affect peel-ability: the hen’s age, what the hen ate, how long since the egg was laid, the temperature and humidity at which the egg has been stored, how it was boiled, in what kind of water with what additives, how long it was boiled, how long since the boil was completed, and so on.

You might wonder, was this egg ever alive? Almost certainly not. If it had been, you might find an embryonic chick folded around the yolk, to your great surprise. A rooster had to have contributed, but roosters are rare nowadays in industrial societies. Men might become similarly rare after robots start handling physical threats and heavy objects, and sperm banks start providing the male half of most new human genomes.

Your skin is equivalent to the egg’s membrane. Your skin is the membrane that defines you as a living organism in life as we know it on our planet. It includes the mucous membrane in your nose and along your entire digestive system. Topologically, you are a section of digesting pipe with some holes and some protuberances. To be a living organism is to be exchanging energy with the surroundings, now, through a semi-permeable membrane. Had there been a chick in the egg, and had the chick hatched successfully, its skin, its new membrane, would newly define it as an organism, replacing the egg’s temporary-storage membrane.

Somewhere in the earliest moments of life as we know it, the first membrane came together to enclose the first living cell. In the billions of years since then, that one membrane has budded and divided into uncountably many pieces, each enclosing a living organism. To reproduce is to pass on a piece of the membrane that surrounds and encloses its own DNA. Life on earth consists of exactly one membrane, divided and re-divided and re-divided for eons.

Your human membrane is part of a lineage that started about 6 million years ago, splitting away from what are now chimpanzees and bonobos. Mammals split from reptiles some 250 million years ago. Down the other lineage, birds split from the other reptiles about 60 million years ago. Humans domesticated chickens about 5,000 years ago.

You and the egg you hold in your hand are both descended from exactly one common ancestor, one living reptile of unknown type, that walked or swam on the earth more than a quarter billion years ago, just before the first mammal came into being. You and your egg are relatives. You share the same skin. Say hello!

Natural Subtraction

Horticulturists and breeders select which of their stock will reproduce a next generation. They do so for specific purposes, for example to gain more tomatoes per vine, more milk per cow, more speed on the racetrack, less aggressiveness inside the home, and so on. They cull – remove – the least-promising individuals from the current population. Darwin wrote in Origin of Species, “When a race of plants is once pretty well established, the seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the ‘rogues,’ as they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard.” Selecting the next generation proceeds mainly by subtracting the least well-suited, the least desirable, the least fit.

Sometimes culling – un-selection or selection-against – happens in effect naturally, needing no judgment on the owner’s part. Some individuals simply cannot reproduce, for example because their sexual organs did not develop. Others turn out frail, or hyper-restless, or lame, or unable to digest well. Such individuals are usually predictably unfit and routinely culled. Still, some few might have reproduced successfully.

On the other side, some of the most apparently fit individuals will turn out not to reproduce purely due to chance, say a lightning strike. Others have deep, hidden defects that will lead to non-viable offspring or prevent reproduction, such as a cow’s twisted uterus. These defects often emerge too late for the owner to have culled efficiently. Nothing and no one can predict with certainty that any one apparently fit individual can and will produce viable, fertile offspring. In contrast, unfitness is often predictable with certainty.

Darwin used the term “natural selection” to help his intended audience understand evolution. Many if not most of his readers were breeders and/or horticulturists either for livelihood or by hobby. He himself bred pigeons and cultivated primroses and orchids. He knew the risk of using this term: in the first of his two volumes on variation he wrote, “The term ‘natural selection’ is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity.”

He was wrong. Use of the term “natural selection” has sown ongoing confusion and delay in understanding evolution. It continues to do so even now, more than 160 years after Origin was first published. Creationist critics flog it as empty – which it is. Nothing is selecting. Natural selection is not a force, yet a search on “force of natural selection” returns upwards of a million hits.

Natural selection is the outcome of life having proposed and the environment having disposed. For an evolving river, nothing selects the actual channels and basins and oxbows, and no one reflects on what designs a river. For life reproducing or attempting to, nothing selects what will turn out to be the successes.

In the wild, natural subtraction occurs. Chance disables some robust individuals or prevents them from reproducing. Other individuals were born with defects, some visible, many not. As with a river, a model complete enough to enable reliably accurate prediction of reproductive outcomes would have to approximate the size and complexity of the entire ecosystem, the whole planet, the total universe. Such a model cannot exist. Outcomes remain forever unpredictable other than in a statistical sense.

I propose that we humans retire “natural selection” gradually and instead call it “natural subtraction” or “natural erosion” or something equivalent. The environment is not passive in the process – the predator seeks its prey, which happens to be our organism of interest – but the environment overall has no purpose and no goal. Differential reproductive outcomes cannot be predicted; they can be known definitively only in hindsight, in the minds of observers. Like quantum states.

Like a River, Unpredictably Co-Evolving

Said the ferryman Vasudeva, “…the river, one can learn everything from it.” –Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

A river flows from some higher point of land and ends at some lower place. The endpoint can be the sea, a lake, another river, or a terminus where the ground absorbs water and ends its flow. An example of the last is the western-USA Colorado River. A river never flows upwards. A river can seem to flow backwards, for example when incoming ocean tidal water raises the Hudson River estuary’s level in upstate New York.

Natural forces drive a river. Sunlight evaporates water up into the atmosphere. Gravity pulls water back down to earth in the form of rain. Strong and weak nuclear forces hold collected water in basins that form atop rock and soil. Gravity pulls standing water into a channel or channels down which it flows as a stream or river. Some rivers emerge from underground aquifers via gravity and nuclear forces. All these actions occur across time.

Natural formations constrain and shape a river. Unless rock formations prevent it, a river tends to flow straight where the slope is steep and tends to wind and meander and braid where the slope is gentle. A river can have its equilibrium suddenly punctuated where a cliff drops from rugged mountainous terrain down to sandy flatlands – a “saltation” in evolutionary terminology.

Many rivers are born atop new land, for example on young volcanic islands in lakes or oceans, as in the below image. Every river eventually dies. Maybe its tectonic plate subducts, or humans destroy it, or its water sources dry up, or an asteroid strike changes the landscape radically.

A new island rises from the water (the one pictured above is in Tonga, at -19.178944,-174.849813, visible in Google Maps only in satellite view). Rain falls on it. During the island’s early life, flowing water forms rivulets and streams back to the ocean or lake. Water carves gullies and small canyons. Walls of soil and gravel collapse and parallel streams merge. Eventually there may be some more or less permanent rivers down to the sea. None are guaranteed. The island itself may be destroyed, never having formed a river. Or it might expand to the size of a continent and contain hundreds of rivers.

For a new rising island, could we humans predict accurately where the rivers will eventually flow? Could any agency predict, say an extraordinarily sophisticated quantum-computing machine? No, not reliably accurately. For that we would need a massive numerical model that captures all aspects of the river’s surroundings and circumstances, and both their and the island’s future history: every ocean current, all rainfall, every breath of wind, every earthquake, every meteorite or asteroid strike, every rock, fissure, twist in subterranean lava flow, and so forth. Massive.

For an infant river, we cannot even predict where forces will carve the first tiny channel exiting from a small new basin say 50 meters across. The basin is enclosed by edge walls of rock and soil. The height of the wall varies considerably, from less than a meter to many meters. Gravity causes water to press downward and sideways uniformly in every direction; this turns out to be important. A reasonable model might predict that water will first exit over a low portion of the wall. But a higher wall portion might split due to an earthquake, and water might first spill out there.

Suppose this small basin has exceptionally uniform walls only about 3 centimeters above water all around, and everywhere made of almost the same rock and soil. Suppose also that the model correctly predicts that no fissures will occur for years. What does the model need to know now? Whether a meteorite or comet or asteroid will strike at or near this basin in the next months and years. Exactly where and when water will enter the basin in the next months and years. Exactly where edge erosion will proceed a little faster than elsewhere. All rainfall and wind events: a stiff wind with rain could drive waves into one area of the wall and break a channel there, and that channel could evolve over hundreds of thousands of years to become the main river. Nothing and no one can predict reliably accurately where the first exit from the basin will occur, much less where the rivers will eventually be, or even if there will be any rivers. Only a supernatural agency could predict reliably accurately.

A river is born, lives and dies within the context of its surroundings and circumstances. Like life, the river shapes its environment while its environment shapes it: they co-evolve. Time is change. Energy and matter form the river, sunlight powers it, and gravity and the nuclear forces constrain it.

Life is like that, like a river – but immeasurably more complex. Nothing and no one can, or ever could, predict its exact future course. In particular, we humans cannot predict life’s course other than statistically, as probabilities calculated from measurements of past events in those surroundings and circumstances. Every organism, lineage and population co-evolves with its surroundings and circumstances, which in turn co-evolve with rest of the entire universe. Everything is always in flux. Time is change. Evolution of life is not random in all aspects – molecular physics and chemistry constrain what is possible – but evolution of life is not predictable with reliability and accuracy other than through a fully detailed model of essentially the whole universe. But constructing such a model would require energy and matter commensurate with the whole universe, and therefore it is impossible. The model itself would be enormous, and therefore it would have to model itself too, recursively. And model itself modeling itself, and….

Life as we know it on earth is like that: recursive, co-evolving with all of not-life, co-evolving with other life, driven by sunlight, pulled and pushed by gravity, constrained by the nuclear forces … and forever unpredictable in detail.

Lewis Dartnell’s “Origin”: How evolution actually works

Regarding Lewis Dartnell’s book Origin, Basic Books 2019.

Dear Bernard,

Nice catch, thanks for alerting me about this book! I immediately bought it online and began reading it. The book is very well written and interesting. But the writing suffers from old-style uninformed, muddy and backwards thinking about evolution. Not his fault! It’s the orthodoxy we all learned; my mission is to help us all evolve beyond it.

I’ve stopped reading the book for now at the following assertions on pages 18-19, which I critique below: “… intelligence, and the extremely versatile behaviour it allows, is an adaptation similar to the use of a multi-tool Swiss army knife … [it] is the evolutionary solution to the problem of an environment that shifts faster than natural selection can adapt the body.”

I maintain that intelligence is not an “adaptation” in the anthropomorphic sense of a direct response to rapid changes in the environment. Intelligence is an outcome of an extraordinarily long, undirected evolutionary process. It is not a “solution to a problem” or problems like a Swiss army knife is. Natural selection does not “adapt the body”.

The underlying causative mechanisms actually work as follows.

Darwin wrote, “selection does nothing without variation” (Darwin 1868, Variation vol 1). This should be completely obvious.

Early in the evolution of life on earth, mutation of DNA sufficed to introduce variation into organisms’ reproduction, so that each generation was a “descent with modification” in Darwin’s words. Bacteria reproduce as often as every 30 minutes. RNA/DNA copying errors – one source of mutation – occur on average about once every 10 million base pairs. The vast majority of such errors are harmless, invisible (which by the way might help explain “junk DNA”). Genetic mutations also occur spontaneously, though more rarely, from radiation and chemical effects. Early on, single-celled organisms including bacteria could keep up with rapid environmental changes because of their brief lifespans, rapid reproduction, and the physical fact of mutation at a stable and fast enough rate. In fact, the bacterial reproduction rate is almost certainly an undirected evolutionary outcome driven by the physics-determined mutation rate. It’s not that the bacteria “adapted”, it’s that the bacterial lineages that reproduced  – and varied – either too quickly or not quickly enough did not survive. Life proposes, the environment disposes.

Over time, the degree of variation during descent with modification evolves to reflect the degree of variation in the external environment. It could not be otherwise.

Prof. Dartnell does not observe that the key “adaptation” that happened to occur in response to earth’s rapidly changing environments was/is genetic recombination via random (unpredictable) gene swapping during sexual reproduction. That change emerged about 1 billion years ago. It accelerates variation dramatically. Each act of sexual reproduction creates one of 2^n different offspring where n is the number of chromosomes in the species’s DNA. For humans that number is 23, and 2^23 = 8,388,608. Thus each new child embodies one of 8+ million possible genomes, all different from each other. Homo sapiens reproduces about once every 15+ years or longer, not once every few minutes. Homo ultimately evolved intelligence and self-awareness due directly to genetic recombination. After sexual reproduction began, almost a billion years of earth’s variegated history went by before life evolved evident intelligence. We sapiens happen to be its first manifestation. Or are we? Maybe octopi got there hundreds of millions of years before we did, and maybe we’ll find that out pretty soon. Or maybe Homo erectus got there first some 2 million years ago. Only time and careful research can tell. Possibly we’ll never know for sure.

About the bacteria, they too developed a sort of sexual reproduction, through what is now called lateral gene transfer. Single-celled organisms gather together and exchange fragments of genetic material, which has the effect of producing far more variation than does mutation. And in fact, sexual reproduction likely evolved out of lateral gene transfer.  Some 40 years ago when UMass biology professor Lynn Margulis (wife of Carl Sagan) published papers asserting bacteria’s remarkable behavior, she was first ignored by evolutionary biologists, then laughed at, then attacked with no small amount of disdain or worse. But biologists finally accepted what is indeed fact. Margulis won, but it took decades. We sapiens are sometimes – well, often – not so sapient. We’re still learning.

Wayne

Evolution and the Synthesis of Form

Architect Christopher Alexander, now 83, wrote the following in his 1964 doctoral thesis Notes on the Synthesis of Form – I have changed some words for readability and added emphases:

Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit. …

For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work. …

It is important to understand that the individual person in an unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist.

Life and evolution are like that. Man proposes and the universe disposes. Life proposes and the environment disposes – and thereby indirectly and passively tends to “select.” Over time, what turn out to be improvements tend to persist.

Darwin never used the term “fitness” in its current evolution-related sense. He addressed how a lineage of organisms converges towards a good fit with its context, with its current surroundings and circumstances, with its environment. He knew that descent with modification – making some sort of change, some variation, from each generation to the next – enables a lineage’s fit with its context to improve. He wrote, “selection does nothing without variation” (Darwin 1868). His Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) starts in Chapter 1 by discussing variation between generations and variability among individual organisms. He published two large volumes devoted just to variation and variability. He did not know, and in 1859 could not have known, the mechanisms of Mendelian inheritance, DNA mutation, or genetic recombination, all of which came together after 1920 and culminated in the 1940s Modern Synthesis.

Three distinct causes, a basis of three dimensions, suffice to explain evolution of life on earth as we know it: 1) time; 2) the four natural physical forces electromagnetism, gravity, and strong and weak nuclear forces; and 3) random variation: randomization of genetic material from generation to generation through mutation and recombination. Evolution literally means “unfolding through time.” Sunlight powers life on earth (geothermal heat might power some life). Mutation in DNA is inevitable, most often due to unrepaired errors during copying. Recombination comes either from gene swapping during sexual reproduction, or from lateral genetic transfer among organisms following asexual reproduction. Simple cloning always fails, and soon. Recombination emerged as a necessary consequence of the first two causes.

Randomization can also be viewed as mutation plus “sufficiently accurate copying” of both DNA and learned behaviors (Gaia Vince, 2020), with emphasis on the value of slight imperfections, slight misfits. Behaviors, however, are not necessarily passed on at all from one generation to the next, while DNA is always passed on.

Critically, mutation and recombination of DNA occur everywhere in life itself as we know it, at every level from chromosome to organism to population to species. Outcomes are unpredictable, but the processes of mutation and recombination execute with measurable, mostly stable parameters. All other candidates for a third causal dimension – either singly or as a group – are not inherent in life itself: fitness, natural selection, adaptive landscapes, adaptation, taxonomies, niche construction, multilevel selection, environmental induction, genetic drift, founder’s effects, bottlenecks, and so forth. All these exist only in the minds of observers, as models, and all are visible only after the fact in hindsight. This is not to diminish them in any way, only to recognize that they are derivative, not causal.