Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum 1st rule of evolution, strive for complexity

The news item with this title is interesting but, like too many items, misses the point through using an incorrect, neo-Darwinian model of the origin of species (as opposed to variation of species which is neo-Darwinian).

Everyone is familiar with natural laws. If you pour some water into a glass there are some standard rules that are obeyed, the water flows to fill the shape of the glass and tends to form a stable horizontal surface, etc. You do not expect the water to spontaneously jump out of the glass and head for the ceiling. Yet if you heat the water eventually a point is reached when the heating overturns the conditions required for water to remain a liquid , the water boils and it does spontaneously jump out of the glass and head for the ceiling. Anyone who has studied a science like Physics or Chemistry will be familiar with the concept of such critical points. These are points where changed conditions result in one set of rules and equations describing the behaviour of a system being replaced by another set. It is pointless to measure characteristics of ice and attempt to use these characteristics to predict the behaviour of water, still less of steam. Most natural systems have such critical points where a change in temperature, energy, speed, pressure etc past some critical value results in appearance or disappearance of distinctive characteristics of a system.

The same situation applies in evolution. In normal, everyday situations there are natural constraints on the evolutionary behaviour of living things. These constraints limit the possible ways in which evolution occurs to the well known neo-Darwinian model, concisely summarised as “random change” plus “natural selection”. Evolutionary phenomena can be fairly accurately matched to the expectations of neo-Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms (there are several such mechanisms). There is any amount of material on this so I will not comment further. Given a population of some form of life in a changing environment you would not expect them to actively change their genes to better fit the new environments, and they do not. However every living thing has an evolutionary past stretching back over, at present, about four billion years. Within that history there are evolutionary experiences of varying severity – about four million one-in-a-thousand year events, about four once-in-a-billion-year events and all grades between. Within these events the equivalent of heating on water occurs and the normal assumptions of neo-Darwinian evolution become inapplicable. A radically different form of evolutionary mechanism becomes possible and the living organisms do actively change their genes to better fit their environment. To understand how the effect occurs you must understand the evolutionary constraints and the way in which they change.

Anyone familiar with Darwinist arguments will have met the claim that unfavourable mutations outnumber favourable mutations. It should be remembered that, in evolutionary terms, favourable and unfavourable relates solely to the probability of descendants, the probability of avoiding extinction. This favourable/unfavourable relationship is the first casualty of the changed regime. For a species facing incipient extinction there is no such thing as an unfavourable mutation. Had a Dodo had a mutation that caused all its eggs to explode it would not have had even one fewer descendants today than would a Dodo without that mutation. Almost all mutations in such a situation are neutral – too small to have any effect on the outcome - but a few large mutations can allow survival. A mutation that turned a Dodo bright blue with a taste and texture of burnt rubber might have been identifiable and inedible and capable of survival of its descendants. So in extreme situations a very few favourable mutations outnumber unfavourable mutations (at zero).

Under normal conditions a change in the environment results in a change in the average characteristics of the affected species as natural selection culls individuals according to their characteristics. Mild selection eliminates only a few aberrant individuals and results in minor changes in the distribution of characteristics. For such natural selection the only way for an organism to increase the prospects for its descendants is to change its characteristics toward the new optimum, a process which can only be achieved through a few of the sexual instincts. Extreme change and selection eliminates all but a few aberrant individuals. In this situation, where all individuals at, or close to, the previous optimum an increase in survival can be achieved purely through an increase in diversity. If survivors come from those individuals six standard deviations from normal in some characteristic a doubling of the variance will result in survival of the much larger group three standard deviations from normal in that characteristic. No change in average characteristic, with its associated concept of a direction to evolution, is required.

These two changes permit evolutionary mechanisms in which an organism takes the evidence of incipient extinction as a stimulus and responds with an increase in mutation rate, giving an increased variance and a greater probability of leaving descendants. Note that most of the descendants of the species, and in extreme cases all of the descendants, will be from individuals with an appropriate pairing of stimulus and response and this pairing will, naturally, be present in their descendants. This inheritance of evolutionary responses marks another major difference from Neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism functions now almost exactly as it did four billion years ago. In contrast any organism that comes up with a better pairing of evolutionary stimulus and evolutionary response tends to leave more descendants so that the most effective forms of active evolution become increasingly common to the virtual exclusion of all others. Active evolution evolves, although the time interval between successive improvements makes this improvement fairly slow and several billion years elapsed before a really good set of responses became dominant.

It is worth expressing this point in an alternative way. There are exactly three requirements for active evolution:
1) At the time of active evolution and for the species doing the active evolution there has to be a behaviour that affects the genes of the organism and significantly increases the probability of at least some members of the population surviving and leaving descendants.
2) There must be some signal in the environment (dead bodies and the absence of live bodies work) that correlates with the possibility in 1.
3) The combination of stimulus and response must occur with sufficient frequency for those individuals with an appropriate link between stimulus and evolutionary response to be selected through their improved ability to survive.

The most important of the active evolutionary processes is lateral gene transfer. The basic process can be described as the acquisition, by a species that cannot survive in its environment, of genes from a species that can. Thriving individuals, and only thriving individuals, produce organised DNA fragments as bacterial plasmids, pollens, milt etc – doing this imposes a significant load on the organism. This allows a failing and therefore receptive organism to identify plausible genes even in the absence of the flourishing individual. This mechanism is of particular significance as it directional – there is a specific thriving organism with a specific genome toward which the unsuccessful organism is acting to move. In addition the number of candidate genes is small and the number of copies immense so that massively parallel genetic change is common. Furthermore it sufficiently rapid that a failing organism that makes an unsuccessful acquisition normally has time to repeat the process building up increasingly complex patterns of additional genes with their associated correlates in biochemistry and biological mechanisms. Another point contrary to Darwinist propaganda - there is no fundamental difference between complex organisms and bacteria in this form of evolution as all complex organisms have internal body fluids which contain temporary or permanent bacterial populations providing bacterial genetic material to all cells in the complex organism and acting as intermediaries for genes from other complex organisms.

ALthough active evolutionary mechanisms occupy only a few millionthe of a species evolutionary past the processes are so spectacularly more effective that they dominate species production. The origin of species complexity is simply that in lateral gene transfer the active evolutionary process can only terminate in one of three ways. 1. The active evolution can fail leaving an extinct species. 2. The active evolution may acquire a genetic mechanism that functions sufficiently closely to that of succesful species in the environment that the environmental stress is reduced below threshold. 3. Acquired genes assemble into a novel genetic mechanism.

There is no "strive for complexity", the continual increase in complexity is a natural consequence of the real, as opposed to the populist neo-Darwinian, processes of evolution.

Thx for that. Perhaps we were a tad cavalier with that headline. Would "increasing complexity inevitable in successful species" be a better headline?

Interesting lines of thought DaveRAFinn

2nd rule of evolution = Maximise progeny?

For those of you familiar with my favorite quote:
"Life is just Nature's Way of turning Light into Heat,"

I'm thinking it would work just as insightfully with Evolution.
"Evolution is just Nature's Way of maximizing Entropy (the conversion of light into heat).

...or maybe it's just that the force to maximize entropy drives evolution?

[quote=Mike Kremer]Interesting lines of thought DaveRAFinn

2nd rule of evolution = Maximise progeny?
.Which means plenty of Sex
http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKN2040405820080320

There is no such rule of evolution.

Mike, I took your post to be joke.
I took the original post to be serious (not to mention verbose).
The title of the thread is "1st rule of evolution, strive for complexity"

I repeat, there is no such rule of evolution.

[quote=Mike Kremer]
Ok FF, you are forgiven, this time.
But your post #25174 coming so soon, immediately after my own
logically referred to my post #25162 directly above your post.

Had you stated whether you were referring to "The 1st rule, or, The 2nd rule" would have been your better option, in this case.
I know Zilch about evolution, which is why I did not reply to DaveRAFinn's original post titled "1st rule of evolution,...>",
other than I found it interesting.

"Peace to All Men" Mike Kremer