From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu 27 Oct 2005 - 21:35:14 GMT
> From: Derek Gatherer <d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: The evolution of "evolution"
>
> At 22:03 24/10/2005, Dace wrote:
>
>
> >other people
> >would have
> > > seen the same thing. I did cell culture for nearly 2 years, and I
never
> >saw
> > > anything like that.
> >
> >You can't see what you're not looking for. In fact, you literally can't
see
> >influence passed between physically separated cultures for the simple
reason
> >that it's not visible.
>
> No, the reason why nobody can see signals passed between separate
> flasks of cells is that it simply doesn't happen.
I believe that's called begging the question. This takes us to the heart of
reductionistic methodology. Contact mechanics among molecular components is
assumed to be the basis of all organic events. Since researchers see no
reason to look for anything that might contradict this view, they never find
evidence for holistic causation and take this as confirmation that they were
right all along.
> But then
> considering you believe that long deceased dinosaurs are still
> signalling to us from the Jurassic, I suppose for you it is a
> perfectly reasonable proposition.
For humans to be influenced by dinosaurs would be like me having your
memory. We have human/hominid/primate/mammalian memory. Dinosaur memory is
for the birds. However, any species that evolves into a state similar
enough to the dinosaur will fall under its field of influence.
You may find this proposition odd, but that's not reason enough to dismiss
it. All the way back to Copernicus science has been showing us that nature
doesn't agree with our ideas of how it should be. If you feel holistic
memory is unscientific, you must explain how it contradicts either itself or
established scientific principles.
> >As cell biologist Stephen Rothman points out, if you provide evidence
that
> >reductionism can't provide a coherent explanation (e.g. in the case of
> >protein movement) reductionists simply dismiss the evidence as flawed.
In
> >this way their beliefs become unfalsifiable. What this demonstrates is
that
> >many scientists are ruled by the reductionistic meme more than the
> >scientific method.
>
> Rothman is a reductionist - he says so in his book.
Rothman notes that reductionism "has been of inestimable, even transcendent,
value" but that "it has been a double-edged sword." To identify yourself as
a reductionist is to fail to recognize the way it narrows the field of
possibilities and blocks scientific progress.
> What he is
> opposed to is "strong micro-reductionism", as am I and as is almost
> every biologist I know (see Cohen and Stewart's "Collapse of
> Chaos").
Strong micro-reductionism states that the whole has no attributes that
aren't in some way traceable back to the parts. In biology this is
expressed in terms of genotype-phenotype. Whatever is observable about the
organism is derived from information contained in its genes (or the
gene/RNA/protein complex).
> This is the same kind of anti-science tactic used by the
> creationists - identify a healthy disagreement within science and
> attempt to twist it to claim that science is crumbling.
Part of the confusion here is the precise meaning of science. As Rothman
points out, most biologists would regard the phrase "reductionistic science"
as redundant. Same goes for "mechanistic science." In their view, science
is a process whereby systems are reduced to their parts, and the behavior of
these parts is explained according to contact mechanics. Yet by this
definition, physics became unscientific with the advent of field theory,
according to which the parts are under the influence of the whole at a
distance.
> >Reductionism rests on the common sense notion of contact mechanics
between
> >visible components. This is not a scientific concept but a deeply
> >ingrained, widely distributed habit of thought, i.e. a highly successful
> >meme.
>
> Reductionism is about cause and effect, that's all.
Reductionism is a particular view of causation that promotes one type above
all others. This despite the fact that field theory abolished the monopoly
of reductionistic causation. In a solar system, it's the whole (the
gravitational field) that causes the parts (the sun and planets) to move in
their characteristic ways. According to Aristotle, whose four-fold view of
causation has never been significantly improved upon, what causes a baby
turtle, say, to grow up into an adult turtle is its membership in its
species. We might update Aristotle by stating that the embryo is under the
field of influence of the species of turtle to which it belongs. To view
this as unscientific is to confuse science, the study of causation, with
reductionism, the study of reductionistic causation. What defines the
reductionism meme is precisely this confusion.
> The Victorians
> thought brains were probably like very sophisticated steam engines;
> today we liken them to computers. The mechanical analogies are
> always going to be rubbish, but that doesn't mean that effects have no
causes.
Not every effect is the result of an "efficient" cause. For instance, that
I'm writing this text results from my goal of communicating a set of
insights and not merely the mechanical action of molecules in my brain. To
understand my behavior you must regard me in whole and not merely in part.
Reductionism can't explain life on its own terms and so replaces life with
machine and explains that instead.
> >The reductionistic hypothesis is more complex and
> >unwieldy insofar as it assumes that genes possess all the information
> >required to build an organism and that they possesses the magical power
to
> >compute precisely how they must combine to bring about this stupendously
> >improbable event.
>
> No, enough Hoyle's fallacy! You keep going on about this even though
> I keep correcting you. How improbable is it that one person will win
> a series of say, 10, coin tosses in a row? See Dennett's "Darwin's
> Dangerous Idea" for the answer (given the correct circumstances, it's
> 100% certain). Try Dawkins "The Blind Watchmaker" while you're at
> it. It's only improbable if you have to start from scratch, and
> organisms never have to start from scratch.
My statement was about development, not evolution. According to the
reductionistic theory, the forms and functions of an organism follow from
the information contained in genes.
> >And how does [Aspergillus] remember its billion year ancestral
> >history? Is the
> >knowledge divided into bits of information stored in its genes?
>
> It doesn't have to "remember". There is no "memory" requiring to be
> recalled. Does a motor car have memory of its ancestry from the Ford
> Model T?
A car is created by an intelligent designer. In this case, the information
on how it's to be built is contained in the mechanic, not the mechanism.
Alas, we no longer take seriously the notion of a supernatural mechanic who
designs and builds the species of life, so we must therefore locate the
impetus for the creation of an organism within the organism itself. There
are two ways of achieving this. We can claim that the organism is still a
mechanism but whose construction occurs blindly, or we can recognize that an
organism is merely a particle in a field of influence known as a species,
and the genes belonging to that organism, rather than having to build the
damn thing from scratch, merely serves to individuate it from others of its
kind.
> >Given that
> >the correct sequence of combinations in the timing of penicillin
production
> >is transcalculational, how can all that information fit?
>
> No, I told you before, that simply is not true.
I take it you're not familiar with combinatorics. If you have 1000 genes,
each having a wild type and a mutant type (the simplest assumption we can
make), then the possible number of ways they can combine is 2 to the 1000th
power. Believe it or not, this figure cannot ever be calculated by any
conceivable supercomputer in any amount of time.
> It's not
> transcalculational at all. If biosynthetic processes were
> transcalculational, biochemistry in vitro would be impossible, as how
> could a poor human chemist possibly do such things in his/her
> head?
Plenty of biochemical processes can be calculated. This is neither here nor
there.
> >If you insist on materially mediated transmission-- a metaphysical
> >proposition having no relationship to scientific investigation--
>
> No, this is wrong. Basic genetics demonstrates that inheritance is
> materially mediated. Genes are material. There's nothing
> "metaphysical" about it.
This is the fallacy of confusing the particular with the universal. That
*some* inheritance is mediated by genes doesn't mean *all* inheritance is
mediated by genes. That all inheritance must be materially mediated is a
metaphysical proposition. It says something about the nature of reality
that not only can't be verified but appears to be contradicted by physics.
> >that
> >adaptations arising from the intelligent behavior of creatures cannot be
> >passed on, and the only source of adaptation becomes genetic mutation.
>
> Ah, the daily Hoyle's fallacy. I should have expected it. I'll say
> it again, just as I've said it in 2 or 3 previous messages. The
> source of adaptation is _not_ just mutation, it is mutation plus
> selection over a very, very long period of time.
But ultimately it's mutation, since selection merely works with the raw
material provided by mutation. Selection can amplify a change brought on by
genetic mutation, but it can't generate the change in the first place.
> >Thus
> >evolution becomes a purely mechanical process involving mutation and
natural
> >selection, leaving no room for will and intelligence, the hallmarks of
life.
>
> .... which oddly you seem to in any case acknowlege in the next
> sentence. Maybe, you're actually starting to understand evolution now,
Ted.
Note that I wrote "evolution" there, not "adaptation" or "variation." In
fact, the conflation of adaptation and variation is a major weakness of
reductionist evolution. In our own experience we find that adaptations
result far more often from spontaneous discovery than spontaneous variation
in the genome. Just as cultural memory allows human adaptations to
propagate over time, species memory allows animal adaptations to propagate.
> >Intelligence will find its way back in somehow, if not in the Darwinian
way
> >then in the creationist way.
>
> Creationism only flourishes when people are poorly educated about biology.
Quite the contrary, creationism flourishes when people are all too aware of
the mechanistic claims of biology. If you're going to have a mechanism,
shouldn't you have a mechanic? All the machines that ever existed in the
history of the world were built through intelligent design.
> >Instead of God
> >creating species, a combination of mutation and selection determines it.
>
> Excellent. Hoyle's fallacy finally gone. Yes, that is how species
> originate, you might say it is a single sentence precis of the
> "Origin of Species" (perhaps a pedant might demand "variation"
> replaces "mutation" in order not to force a Fisherian anachronism on
Darwin)
Exactly. And for Darwin, the chief source of variation, far outweighing
mutation, i.e. "spontaneous variation," is the intelligent adaptations made
by creatures in response to environmental conditions. Far better to posit
species memory to account for the inheritance of living adaptations than to
ditch Darwinian evolution in favor of an inherently implausible,
reductionistic alternative.
ted
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