Evolution Is Not Just About Life

[sealchan]

No biochemists or related in the scientific field would debate or discuss evolution outside of biological terms. Evolution just does not occur in inorganic nonliving material. It only occurs in living organisms.

That's my understanding of it.

I initially got it watching a debate between Kent Hovind and a biochemist during a debate on ID to which he said he couldn't even answer the questions Kent was asking because his examples had nothing to do with living organisms.

That's why things like the watchmaker nonsense and the illustrious self-assembling car examples doesn't work.

Molecular systems can form into auto-catalytic systems on their own. This is a form of emergence and self-reproduction.

I would never argue that all evolutionary systems are analogous. But I would argue that any system which develops a series of stable states over time and based on previous states and environmental conditions has as much right to thought of in terms of its evolution as to DNA based organisms.

 

[sealchan]

Here is some off the cuff speculation about how one might think about evolution prior to and post biological systems.

What if in our Universe the following is true:

All physical phenomena can be seen to occur within an open, but identifiable system including

• the sub-atomic/atomic
• the molecular
• the organismal (biological)
• the psychological-social-oral
• the collective-institutional-literate

If we observe these systems as they go through the process of change we can, perhaps, establish two qualities of those systems...

• Their "burn-in time" which is the time a newly formed system takes to settle down into its first homeostatic state
• Their sustained rate of change which is a measure of the rate of the creative formation of new emergent phenomena over time within that system

let's look at each these qualities for each level of the system:

The sub-atomic/atomic:
Burn-In Time: Very fast...after the Big Bang Planck epoch according to Wikipedia the universe settles into an original configuration of hydrogen and helium in about 20 minutes...
Sustained rate of change: After that it takes millions of years for stars to form and the construction of the higher atoms

The molecular:
Burn-in Time: Molecules formed out of elements but in environments with moderate temperatures (not too hot like in the sun or too cold like in the vacuum of space) the right combination of molecules quickly interact and either cycle out to a final stable state or form continuous cycles of molecular interaction maybe within minutes? Some of these cycles may persist and form long term homeostatic molecular reaction systems
Sustained rate of change: Perhaps further unique long-standing cyclical, homeostatic changes in molecular reaction pathways develop as very low chance systems are randomly "discovered" and once discovered persist bringing a new emergent factor

The organismal:
Burn-In Time: The origin of organisms emerged from long-standing molecular cyclical reaction pathways eventually giving rise to organelles, lipid encased systems which became the cell and finally multi-cellular organisms. The original microscopic organisms probably emerged gradually giving no real sense of a "burn-in time". This process took hundreds of millions of years eventually giving rise to organisms that left the original water-based environment and were able to persist in what had become an oxygen rich environment with abundant solar radiation, origin of original organisms was so gradual that no real burn-in time exists except that initial "discovery" of a lasting structure might relatively quickly prop
Sustained rate of change: Simpler organisms that are microscopic develop more quickly but have given rise at greater and greater intervals to larger and larger species with more complex organs capable of re-presenting the environment in a private and social context. Occasionally some great environmental change might occur that causes a massive extinction event converting a small set of species into a new trunk from which a new diversity can emerge and take over. But species change, by whatever subjective measure that amounts to is a slow process limited, in part, by random genetic mutations

The psychological-social-oral:
Burn-In Time: The origin of psyches goes back as far as brains go, but the ability of an organism to communicate that it is thinking about its own private model probably originated with the ancestors of homo sapiens. it is unknown how gradual the development of language and the ability to communicate through language one's inner state came about.
Sustained rate of change:
Comparative cultural anthropology shows how diverse and persistent ancient ways of understanding self and reality persisted once established. Oral communication nurtured a continual evolution of knowledge as word-of-mouth proves to be a means of passing on memory but is limited to the human brain without many memory aids. After thousands and thousands of years this species began to create rituals and constructed monuments that left significant remains behind for later generations to discover.

The institutional-literate:
Burn-In Time: Perhaps about 5000 years ago systems of writing began to emerge which, in turn, permitted more complex hierarchical societies to form. This allowed technologies to be developed and precisely recorded as well as financial exchanges which improved the efficiency of logistical resource deployment. These technologies spread by virtue of making long distance travel and communication faster and easier.
Sustained rate of change: In the space of that 5000 years human beings began to become its own greatest environmental factor enabling individuals to survive that couldn't before and increasing the chance of survival for all individuals as well as giving rise to calamities that were more destructive than any natural calamity had been previously. Humans have even begun to leave the original biosphere a feat never achieved before intentionally by any other biological species. Communication technology and international organizations make global coordination of human effort possible in real time. Planet wide changes in molecular systems have become such that the whole planet's climate may be influenced primarily by human activity.

Now as an overall pattern it seems that the "higher" the level of systemic activity, the less of a noticable burn-in time there is and the more rapid the sustained rate of change in the system is. At least that is what seems to me to emerge from these quick speculations.

 

[sealchan]

Anyway...ignore the long post...I think that if we start to think about how every physical system has an historical element such that it can be said, in the fullest sense of the term, to be evolving or in story mode, then we can start to show how the biological theory of evolution is really, if not common sense, common wisdom.

One thing that I strongly feel about these days is that it doesnt make a whole lot of sense to believe that the universe arose out of nothing. Everything in the universe evolved out of a lower level of physical reality, why should the atomic/sub-atomic be any different.

And if virtual particles look at all like they came from a vacuum, then why not think that rather than assume, unlike anything else in our experience, that it magically just appeared, why not think that like someone stepping out of the shadows and into light, the Universe as we know it emerged into those forms of physical systems we have the ability to perceive out of some extra universal reality that we cannot perceive?

In the end I expect it is impossible for a science, just as it is for a myth, to tell an origin story without having some sort of mysterious background whether it be quantum fields or deep, dark waters out of which it came.

And this does not in anyway point to someone having done it. The only someones we know of are biological, psychological, cultural someones. And at all levels new things arise out of historical circumstance rather than any pre-determined plan...or perhaps things arise always from an inconceivable mixture of order and the unexpected.

 

[exchemist]

Molecular systems can form into auto-catalytic systems on their own. This is a form of emergence and self-reproduction.

I would never argue that all evolutionary systems are analogous. But I would argue that any system which develops a series of stable states over time and based on previous states and environmental conditions has as much right to thought of in terms of its evolution as to DNA based organisms.

Autocatalysis is merely the acceleration of the rate of a reaction by one of the reaction's own products. This is nowhere near what is required for evolution.

For evolution, you require natural selection of variants occurring during the replication process, so that you get different rate of replication driven by the environment, the result of which being that one form comes to predominate. I am am unaware of any chemical process that does this.

Also I do not see how autocatalysis can be a form of emergence. Can you explain how this can be, with an example?

 

[Samantha Rinne]

The problem is that many creationists like to play semantic games. They in reality have the most trouble accepting biological evolution. A common tactic of theirs is to find a form of "evolution" that is not as well supported by evidence and then use that to try to claim that all "evolution" is false. I do not mind an honest use of an expanded definition of evolution. There is nothing wrong with that. I do object to the dishonest games that some creationists try to play in attempting to refute the theory that they hate so much.

Subduction, your thinking is too limited, and assumes all people think the same (I also noticed this on our flat Earth debates).

To use a phrase from the Twilight Zone, imagine if you will, a world where some people who believe in the Creation actually do believe in some forms of evolution (they just don't agree with Darwin's kill or be killed "survival of the fittest" mentality, Darwin being used to prop up formed of atheism, the notion that dinosaurs are birds and not lizards, and the social Darwinism that peobably helped both eugenics and the Nazi movements). Imagine these same people seeing evolution as a tool God uses to raise the spiritual worth of human souls. And imagine a race of simple primates building art and science and effectively becoming soulful individuals. Oh wait, if we're going by your own standards of all people thinking the same of a certain group, then of course you cannot imagine because all secular ppl want humans to be simple primates in a universe indifferent to them. The question is, do you really want to be typecast this way, the same way you typecast all Creationists?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

One thing that I strongly feel about these days is that it doesnt make a whole lot of sense to believe that the universe arose out of nothing. Everything in the universe evolved out of a lower level of physical reality, why should the atomic/sub-atomic be any different.

This is one manner in which attempts to generalize ideas from evolutionary biology without proper care do not lead to a greater understanding of either evolutionary theory or of other processes in nature (or in simulation, A.I., computer science, etc.). Evolutionary processes lack directionality. Like most genetic and evolutionary algorithms which have sought to capture the nature of biological evolution in various ways, the fitness functions of living systems are not general but local. "Simpler" forms of life can be selected for and be more "fit" for a particular ecological niche (actually, in general the most "fit" organisms in this sense are the simplest), and a tendency towards greater complexity is not, in general, and evolutionary one but rather one possible tendency that we have tended to focus on overmuch.
Extremophiles, single-celled organisms, insects, and in general those forms of life that we might think of as "lower" forms out of which other higher forms evolved have in general evolved into simpler or at least equally simple life forms, requiring little variations over vast periods of time in order to retain optimal fitness (or sufficient fitness). Meanwhile, complex life forms have tended to go extinct.
Nor does the "evolution of a physical system" in phase space or what have you share much in common with biological evolution other than via a general sense of the word. Physical systems are said to evolve in time because even if they remain invariant and stationary time doesn't (and even in relativistic physics, the trajectories of systems with unchanging spatial coordinates will not be stationary as time is not).

And if virtual particles look at all like they came from a vacuum, then why not think that rather than assume, unlike anything else in our experience, that it magically just appeared, why not think that like someone stepping out of the shadows and into light, the Universe as we know it emerged into those forms of physical systems we have the ability to perceive out of some extra universal reality that we cannot perceive?

The vacuum is simply a state of systems that, in relativistic physics, is required for annihilation and creation (raising and lowering) operators that act on such systems because we cannot use the Hamiltonian from quantum mechanics. In classical and quantum mechanics, the Hamiltonian of a system is parameterized by time, while spatial coordinates are really the output of an observable (an operator acting on the system). Relativistic physics requires an equal footing for space and time, however, so spatial position is demoted and becomes, like time, a parameter.
This is central to the reason why the vacuum and virtual particles and so forth are part of QFT and particle physics. In order to quantize the system AND keep time and space on equal footing, the system's "state" is (loosely speaking) formulated as the new operator that now acts on the vacuum (hence vacuum state) as a field with the appropriate raising/lowering & creation/annihilation operations required in order mainly to cohere with energy-mass equivalence, conservation laws/symmetry, and the dynamics of such highly energetic, high velocity systems (virtual particle creation is also a book-keeping device, and is required to allow a consistent calculational scheme that avoids infinite quantities via divergent integrals that are everywhere in QFT).
All this has almost nothing to do with evolutionary biology.
In general, the mathematics underlying evolutionary theory has proved to be most fruitful elsewhere (it is an empirical science). The theoretical biologist Robert Rosen had an interesting take on the reason why:
'What light, then, do biologists shed on the taproot of their own endeavors? In fact, precious little. Indeed, a rather strange and dreary consensus has emerged in biology over the past three or four decades. On the one hand, biologists have convinced themselves that the processes of life do not violate any known physical principles; thus they call themselves “mechanists” rather than “vitalists”. Further, biologists believe that life is somehow the inevitable necessary consequence of underlying physical (inanimate) processes; this is one of the wellsprings of reductionism. But on the other hand, modern biologists are also, most fervently, evolutionists; they believe wholeheartedly that everything about organisms is shaped by essentially historical, accidental factors, which are inherently unpredictable and to which no universal principles can apply. That is, they believe that everything important about life is not necessary but contingent. The unperceived ironies and contradictions in these beliefs are encapsulated in the recent boast by a molecular biologist: “Molecular biologists do not believe in equations.” What is relinquished so glibly here is nothing less than any shred of logical necessity in biology, and with it, any capacity to understand.” (emphases added; pp. 11-14)

Rosen, R. (1991). Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Complexity in Ecological Systems Series). Columbia University Press.

And at all levels new things arise out of historical circumstance rather than any pre-determined plan...or perhaps things arise always from an inconceivable mixture of order and the unexpected.

Things change over time. This does not mean that they all "evolve" in the ways accurately described by evolutionary theory which is, in general, exceptional rather than general.

 

[Heyo]

My avatar is another example. A fully, modern human skull, 22000 years old with anatomical differences attributable to evolutionary development. Thicker, heavier bone structure, slightly enlarged brow ridges, larger than modern humans and with a 13% larger brain capacity.

The last i find particularly interesting, we have a smaller brain than our Cro-Magnon ancestors, why, were cro-magnon more intelligent or has the brain evolved greater efficiency?

Cro-Magnon wasn't more intelligent but she was more allert and perceptive. Shrinking brain size is a common phenomenon in domesticated animals (pigs are one of the most extreme examples). The safety of the captive life makes high allertness unnecessary.

 

[Heyo]

But the core abstract principle of "duplicate using top performers, alter, do a fitness test, repeat" can indeed by used to optimize all kinds of things. Likewise can we see such principles, or principles like it, at work in other phenomenon of reality.


But again, this doesn't change the fact that biological evolution is about biology.

Nope. As you described it, evolution is about replicating systems, replication with variation and a selection process. Life has been the only studied example until recently but it is essentially a systems study not biology.

 

[gnostic]

Also, understanding evolution without understanding ecological systems is nonsensical. Ecology is also the premiere science of systems.

Evolution is about life and the environments they lived in, so ecology is important in Evolution, particularly in Natural Selection.

In Natural Selection, the environment affects life, so when environment changes, life must be able to adapt those changes, by passing the genetic traits that assist with their survival.

 

[ChristineM]

Cro-Magnon wasn't more intelligent but she was more allert and perceptive. Shrinking brain size is a common phenomenon in domesticated animals (pigs are one of the most extreme examples). The safety of the captive life makes high allertness unnecessary.

Depends how you measure intelligence, given their environment, high alertness would be a requirement. This must be acquired and applied (a measure of Intelligence) to survive. The cells required for such alertness (and their ancillaries) don't account for 13% of brain size?

It is my view, understood while in conversation with experts in the field (i spend quite a lot of time volunteering to work with the scientists of les Eyzies, a hobby of mine), that cro magnon were at least as inteligent as us, in some areas more so, in some areas less. There has been corresponding shrinkage and growth in the relevant areas of the brain. But more importantly, the brain has evolved a greater efficiency and so a reduction in size performs a similar function.

 

[sealchan]

Autocatalysis is merely the acceleration of the rate of a reaction by one of the reaction's own products. This is nowhere near what is required for evolution.

For evolution, you require natural selection of variants occurring during the replication process, so that you get different rate of replication driven by the environment, the result of which being that one form comes to predominate. I am am unaware of any chemical process that does this.

Also I do not see how autocatalysis can be a form of emergence. Can you explain how this can be, with an example?

I need to familiarize, or refamiliarize, myself with all this stuff. Suffice it to say that if you search Google for "self-replicating auto-catalytic systems"you will find papers which talk about how these systems form up of themselves over time.

In order to understand this as evolution this cannot be analogous to the more complex cellular forms of life. Molecular reaction cycles dont have their own DNA to pin their "individuality" to. Molecular reaction cycles are their own DNA. What selects the prevalence of these cycles is the environment. What molecules are present? How much energy is there in them medium? Maybe how viscous is it? I'm not a molecular biologist so I'm also not the best source on this particular understanding.

As soon as these molecular reaction cycles start to impact the local environmental conditions in such a way as to influence the reaction cycles themselves, we have a non-linear iterative systemic process which will play out a historical progression which cannot be precisely predicted due to sensitivity to initial conditions. This historical progression (series of changes in the system) delineates an evolution of the components of that system.

I would argue that the evolution of molecular reaction cycles is the basis literally for many of the processes that allow multi-cellukar organisms to evolve as well. Self-replucation, homeostatic molecular systems tied to DNA and the organs of the body, all this is courtesy of the evolution of molecular reaction cycles.

 

[sealchan]

This is one manner in which attempts to generalize ideas from evolutionary biology without proper care do not lead to a greater understanding of either evolutionary theory or of other processes in nature (or in simulation, A.I., computer science, etc.). Evolutionary processes lack directionality. Like most genetic and evolutionary algorithms which have sought to capture the nature of biological evolution in various ways, the fitness functions of living systems are not general but local. "Simpler" forms of life can be selected for and be more "fit" for a particular ecological niche (actually, in general the most "fit" organisms in this sense are the simplest), and a tendency towards greater complexity is not, in general, and evolutionary one but rather one possible tendency that we have tended to focus on overmuch.
Extremophiles, single-celled organisms, insects, and in general those forms of life that we might think of as "lower" forms out of which other higher forms evolved have in general evolved into simpler or at least equally simple life forms, requiring little variations over vast periods of time in order to retain optimal fitness (or sufficient fitness). Meanwhile, complex life forms have tended to go extinct.
Nor does the "evolution of a physical system" in phase space or what have you share much in common with biological evolution other than via a general sense of the word. Physical systems are said to evolve in time because even if they remain invariant and stationary time doesn't (and even in relativistic physics, the trajectories of systems with unchanging spatial coordinates will not be stationary as time is not).

The vacuum is simply a state of systems that, in relativistic physics, is required for annihilation and creation (raising and lowering) operators that act on such systems because we cannot use the Hamiltonian from quantum mechanics. In classical and quantum mechanics, the Hamiltonian of a system is parameterized by time, while spatial coordinates are really the output of an observable (an operator acting on the system). Relativistic physics requires an equal footing for space and time, however, so spatial position is demoted and becomes, like time, a parameter.
This is central to the reason why the vacuum and virtual particles and so forth are part of QFT and particle physics. In order to quantize the system AND keep time and space on equal footing, the system's "state" is (loosely speaking) formulated as the new operator that now acts on the vacuum (hence vacuum state) as a field with the appropriate raising/lowering & creation/annihilation operations required in order mainly to cohere with energy-mass equivalence, conservation laws/symmetry, and the dynamics of such highly energetic, high velocity systems (virtual particle creation is also a book-keeping device, and is required to allow a consistent calculational scheme that avoids infinite quantities via divergent integrals that are everywhere in QFT).
All this has almost nothing to do with evolutionary biology.
In general, the mathematics underlying evolutionary theory has proved to be most fruitful elsewhere (it is an empirical science). The theoretical biologist Robert Rosen had an interesting take on the reason why:
'What light, then, do biologists shed on the taproot of their own endeavors? In fact, precious little. Indeed, a rather strange and dreary consensus has emerged in biology over the past three or four decades. On the one hand, biologists have convinced themselves that the processes of life do not violate any known physical principles; thus they call themselves “mechanists” rather than “vitalists”. Further, biologists believe that life is somehow the inevitable necessary consequence of underlying physical (inanimate) processes; this is one of the wellsprings of reductionism. But on the other hand, modern biologists are also, most fervently, evolutionists; they believe wholeheartedly that everything about organisms is shaped by essentially historical, accidental factors, which are inherently unpredictable and to which no universal principles can apply. That is, they believe that everything important about life is not necessary but contingent. The unperceived ironies and contradictions in these beliefs are encapsulated in the recent boast by a molecular biologist: “Molecular biologists do not believe in equations.” What is relinquished so glibly here is nothing less than any shred of logical necessity in biology, and with it, any capacity to understand.” (emphases added; pp. 11-14)

Rosen, R. (1991). Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Complexity in Ecological Systems Series). Columbia University Press.


Things change over time. This does not mean that they all "evolve" in the ways accurately described by evolutionary theory which is, in general, exceptional rather than general.

I find this "protectionism" of the term evolution more and more interesting. I suspect that underneath it is a concern for a loss of control over a claim to empiricism.

And there is a real concern here I think because we have science that describes the limitations of mathematics when trying to understand physical systems which are subject to non-linear iterative processes such as the ecological evolution of species.

I think that biological evolution is to systems and complexity science is as physics is to Newtonian determinism. Physics once paired with empirical observations and mathematics became the archetype of science in general. The hard sciences were thus born and scientists could set up equipment in a lab and get good work done.

Of course as discoveries in physics were made the gradually led scientists outward toward other topics that were not so amenible to a lab. Scientists found themselves collecting specimens, making systematic observations, developing elegant mathematical frameworks somewhat independently of any lab or hypotheses to test in a lab.

But this work did, in obvious ways, feedback into the lab. It just took more and more ingenuity to do so. Now to make an advancement in physics, sometimes you have to use or construct an instrument that costs millions and millions of dollars. You have to send a probes to another planet or you have to rely on physical clues which, taken on the whole, point you more and more toward a theory that no matter how elegant, still cant quite be fully demonstrated in a lab.

All this is to show up the triumph that is science as modelled by the empirical lab experiment as well as the challenge for science where the lab is hard to attain.

Evolutionary biology is to systems theory as Physics is to science. Evolutionary biology gets some lab time, but it is really more a triumph of human reasoning bringing all sorts of scattered pieces together in an undeniably elegant way. And with the triumph that is the discovery of DNA we have the sort of hard evidence that hard science can love.

But evolutionary theory rests on an abstraction which is now becoming more and more evident: systems theory. Parts interacting together within a greater whole in such a way that they develop the properties of that system as the outcome of historical accident. The appearance of emergent properties such as adaptability which is deeply analogous to intentionality...evolutionary science fans find themselves, without embarrassment, talking about the purpose of an adaptation as if it were intentionally designed by evolution.

Using computer models to simulate cellular automata reveals strange creatures which "glide" across the screen. This is analogous to "purposeful adaptations". There is no purpose, there is no glide. But we do see the analogy and through that same computer simulation it is undeniable, elegant and mathematically sound.

To talk of evolution in detail regarding DNA based organism-parts we should restrain ourselves to ToE. But if we want to understand the environment, we need to understand ecological systems, predator-prey cycles, seasonal cycles of food and resource availability. To understanding homeostasis we need systems theory as evidenced in biological and chemical and thermal systems whose parts are not cells but atoms, molecules and groups of organisms taken as a whole.

The development of the cell involved the evolution of molecular reaction cycles forming more complex structures which in turn formed together as the result of evolution into the "cooperative" (purposeful glider) whole that is the cell with DNA. Once the cell entered then you have the evolution of cellular life forms as we know it through ToE. Life forms participate in ecosystems which also evolve and adapt as atmospheric, geologic and even organisms influences impact these ecosystems.

I will have to come back and deliver the punchline to this...namely regarding how discoveries in complexity science reveal the limitations of an empirical science...

 

[gnostic]

Subduction, your thinking is too limited, and assumes all people think the same (I also noticed this on our flat Earth debates).

To use a phrase from the Twilight Zone, imagine if you will, a world where some people who believe in the Creation actually do believe in some forms of evolution (they just don't agree with Darwin's kill or be killed "survival of the fittest" mentality, Darwin being used to prop up formed of atheism, the notion that dinosaurs are birds and not lizards, and the social Darwinism that peobably helped both eugenics and the Nazi movements). Imagine these same people seeing evolution as a tool God uses to raise the spiritual worth of human souls. And imagine a race of simple primates building art and science and effectively becoming soulful individuals. Oh wait, if we're going by your own standards of all people thinking the same of a certain group, then of course you cannot imagine because all secular ppl want humans to be simple primates in a universe indifferent to them. The question is, do you really want to be typecast this way, the same way you typecast all Creationists?

You haven’t read On Origin Of Species, have you?

Nothing in this book involved killing. Nothing about genocide, nothing about politics.

And it wasn’t Darwin who invented the phrase “survival of the fittest”.

It was coined by Herbert Spencer. And though Spencer has accepted Darwin’ Natural Selection as a biologist, Spencer was also a sociologist and anthropologist, and he had applied this phrase in political and social philosophies.

In term of Evolution, the survival of the fittest only means any organisms being able to adapted to changed environment. Extinction is caused naturally, by any species not being able to continue to produce offspring and thereby dying out because their descendants failed to adapt the changed environment, and this extinction doesn’t include murders or genocide.

Natural Selection is all about biology, not about politics, wars or genocide.

 

[QuestioningMind]

I've seen the argument often made that the Theory of Evolution (ToE) is a topic restricted to the change in biological organisms over time and that it should only be discussed in that context. However, this seems to me to be increasing short-sighted and insular.

There are a growing number of scientific disciplines that incorporate evolutionary mechanisms in other realms. Evolutionary psychology comes to mind. Historians clearly see how cultures and groups come and go due to environmental influences. It has even been proposed that individual ideas or images undergo evolutionary behaviors (memes).

Also, understanding evolution without understanding ecological systems is nonsensical. Ecology is also the premiere science of systems. We have had systems sciences now for almost 70 years. Feedback systems, cybernetic systems, chaotic systems and other mathematical and modeling treatments of systems in an effort to understand how emergent order seems to arise from lower level behavior.

So it seems really odd to me that people would not look at the evolution of biological organisms as deeply connected with the evolution of all the physical systems we observe in the universe. Understanding evolution in this context makes it clear that evolution isn't some completely unique and isolated phenomenon but is a kind of a much larger phenomenon that is clearly at work in the physical systems in our Universe. That is would happen to biological life forms is to be expected. It may be that in biological life forms we have the most profound expression of systems undergoing evolutionary alterations.

Any sincere response is welcome.

There's a HUGE difference between the definition of the SCIENTIFIC theory of evolution and the definitions that the word evolution have been given over time. The SCIENTIFIC definition of the evolutionary process IS restricted to the change in biological organisms over time. However, that doesn't mean that people haven't adopted other definitions for the word. For instance I can say that my views on capital punishment have 'evolved' over the years. Thus the word evolution has ALSO come to mean a change due to external factors over a period of time.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I find this "protectionism" of the term evolution more and more interesting. I suspect that underneath it is a concern for a loss of control over a claim to empiricism.

Which protection? That I don't want to be confused by biologists or to confuse them by speaking about the evolution of the state of physical systems (after all, there is already enough confusion between terms common to both evolutionary biology and areas of machine learning which borrow extensively from living systems but then sometimes use the terminology differently)? Or that I don't think confusing the public further is going to help anyone?
Lots of terms are used in specific ways in specific fields. Public misconceptions of science (and even some misunderstanding among certain fields) is common place enough because people often conflate general meanings of words with technical ones. You see this in creationist writings, popular science, pseudoscience, and beyond.
Evolutionary theory is quite vast and quite old (most fields around today in biology and the life sciences weren't around when Darwin lived). While much is firmly established, there continues to be areas of active research across different fields from neuroscience to theoretical chemistry and astrobiology. Evolutionary theory provides the framework and foundation for much of the research here, including research that seeks to alter or extend or knowledge of evolutionary processes.
The last thing we need is to promote a view which not only encourages widespread misperceptions of the nature of evolutionary theory but actively seeks out ways in which to mislead or confuse others by conflating the terminology used in evolutionary biology and related fields and both "evolution" used more widely and as it is used by the layperson.
Evolution in general tends to imply some manner of direction or goal-oriented nature, and indeed in evolutionary algorithms the entire point of borrowing from evolutionary biology is to use models of evolutionary processes to obtain particular goals, which is antithetical to the kinds of uses of randomness (both in terms of natural selection and beyond) we find in biology. The "evolution" of the cosmos or universe or Earth is at the very minimal a global tendency, while evolutionary processes in biology are fundamentally localized. Researchers already have to go above and beyond whenever they wish to support a view in which certain features, tendencies, patterns, etc., tend to characterize evolutionary processes in general because they already need to make clear distinctions between theories concerning the origins or nature of these patterns found in evolutionary processes and evolutionary theory itself.
What you seem to seek is well beyond this or even beyond those who would suggest that evolution itself can in certain ways be seen as directed towards e.g., greater complexity or thought of in more global terms than the actual processes that take place. It is to take a simple idea as to what evolution tends to mean in common parlance, equate this with the sense used in biology, and then make connections with quite general descriptions or ideas from a wide variety of fields regarding (it would seem) anything that tends to change over time.
But these phenomena are often radically and fundamentally different.

And there is a real concern here I think because we have science that describes the limitations of mathematics when trying to understand physical systems which are subject to non-linear iterative processes such as the ecological evolution of species.

Yes, difference equations can be insoluble, and in general so are differential equations. And both nonlinearities and high dimensional spaces make even the appropriate approximating numerical methods highly non-trivial or even impossible. But these situations (i..e., those in which the governing equations or distributions or systems are nonlinear and the number of variables, particles, functions, etc., is large) are common to QFT, signal processing, economics, statistical physics, cognitive neuroscience, aerodynamics, and on and on. In QFT and statistical physics,we're always solving integrals in dimensions so high even understanding what kind of generalized volumes we're working with becomes all but impossible. The divergences encountered in particle physics and QFT can't be regularized in any consistent manner in general (and when they can it can take a lifetime to figure out how to carry out a small number of calculations). Elsewhere we are plagued by the "curse of dimensionality" (perhaps most especially in the social and behavioral sciences) simply due to the high number of variables. Across fields and in applied math, it is basically always the case that we run into situations in which difference equations can't be well approximated by smooth functions or manifolds that can be integrated over. In these cases and more generally, a great deal of work is typically needed to figure out just how to approach finding a way towards a solution.
Thanfully, mathematicians and scientists have been working on these problems for a very long time. There are entire fields devoted to the kinds of problems one faces when dealing with complicated (nonlinear) signals (discrete or continuous). Most of the work in applied statistics (and all of "big data") concerns finding ways to work with systems in extremely high dimensions without massively ignoring issues such as multicollinearity and dependence or the loss conceptual clarity gained by dimensionality reduction methods such as PCA. Feynman diagrams and an a slew of linguistic devices have been employed for decades now in areas like HEP, statistical physics, condensed matter physics, and similar fields where it will never be possible to even approximate solutions to the evolution of systems even when we know the required integrals exist (they typically don't) because there are just too many equations governing too many "bodies" in the collective for computers to work out answers before the end of the universe.
Sometimes, work in some of these problems leads directly to progress or at least use in other fields. We see this especially with statistical methods. Perhaps more frequently, attempts are made to employ methods (especially if they sound sexy, such as anything with the word "quantum") in fields they were never attempted with little or no progress, such as in most of "econophysics" or in quantum models of cognition.

I don't see how confusing the use of the term "evolution" more than it already is currently being confused all too often is going to help anybody very much. It's not as if evolution comes equipped with a single mathematical tool, framework, approach, or scheme. Research in this field and related fields has made use of or developed a variety of mathematical tools, many of them found in systems sciences or fields that deal in particular with complexity. On the other hand, in work on complex systems we find researchers working with fuzzy sets, expert systems, non-classical probability, and a swathe of other approaches that aren't of much use in evolutionary biology.
So you have on the one hand the fact that much of the mathematical tools that you seem to refer to is being and has been developed elsewhere both thanks to evolutionary biology and independently of it, and on the other the fact that these tools are not sufficiently general for all the work being done already in systems science and complexity research. So, again, I don't see what is to be gained by claiming that the term "evolution" in evolutionary biology "not just about life." It is.

I think that biological evolution is to systems and complexity science is as physics is to Newtonian determinism.

How? Newtonian mechanics isn't deterministic except insofar as differential equations are. It is when one attempts to generalize the deterministic character of Newtonian mechanics beyond where the formalism allows, i.e., to systems that aren't isolated. And furthermore much of complex systems comes from the application of these very laws as they are the differential equations whose nonlinearities lead to much of the kind of complexities you seem to wish to refer to.

Physics once paired with empirical observations and mathematics became the archetype of science in general. The hard sciences were thus born and scientists could set up equipment in a lab and get good work done.

I don't buy into the hard/soft distinction. In most physics, the empirical work is done by the "experimentalists" while the mathematics and theories are worked out by theorists. Historicall, mathematics wasn't seperated from either natural philosophy or the physics it became.

Of course as discoveries in physics were made the gradually led scientists outward toward other topics that were not so amenible to a lab.

They started out there. In data science and in meaurement sciences much of the original work came from the earliest social scientists. In physics, similar work and more was done in the lab only in the sense that telescopes were considered to be in labs. It was all observational, not controlled labratory work. That was mainly what came to be chemistry and was some ~200 years later.
Earlier still, theologians and philosophers worked on developing the probability calculus and formal logics for use in betting.

All this is to show up the triumph that is science as modelled by the empirical lab experiment as well as the challenge for science where the lab is hard to attain.

Most of they physicists I know greatly respect experimentalists but do not consider their work to be as important because all they do is too empirically check what the theorists postulate, and usually they can't work out how to do so for a long time (decades, typically). Similar trends are now found in theoretical biology and chemistry where more and more work is done in fields that don't involve labs so much as whiteboards and coffee with some help from python, mathematica, or something similar.

Evolutionary biology is to systems theory as Physics is to science

It isn't. I know of at least two well established approaches to biology that are different in their outlook but both are explicitly under the umbrella of systems biology. Systems sciences abound in physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, sociology, engineering, etc.
This isn't labs vs. the next generation of science. I don't know anybody working in physics or in systems sciences or elsewhere that unnecessarily and artificially divides scientific research as you seem to be doing. Nor do I understand why you are doing so.

But evolutionary theory rests on an abstraction which is now becoming more and more evident: systems theory.

It doesn't. Partly this is because much of what is shared is due to direct borrowing in systems sciences from earlier work in evolutionary biology, which means that systems theory rests on this work not the reverse. Partly this is because systems sciences involve a vast array of paradigms which aren't found in evolutionary biology, from much of the work done in network science (which is used a lot in some areas of biology but not so much in evolutionary biology so as to much distinguish it from basic graph theory) information theoretic approaches to complexity. Partly this is because there is no singular systems theory but a wide array of concepts that have now been well developed (or abandoned, in certain cases such as catastrophe theory or similar fads) and are used across the sciences which are all interdisciplinary and have been tending away from isolated research groups in particular departments to interdepartmental institutes and the like. Partly because you have your timeline backwards.

 

[ecco]

To use a phrase from the Twilight Zone, imagine if you will, a world where some people who believe in the Creation actually do believe in some forms of evolution

No one needs to imagine it. These people believe in something called Theistic Evolution. Haven't you ever heard of them?

 

[ecco]

he social Darwinism that peobably helped both eugenics and the Nazi movements

Actually the Nazi movement, especially the killing of the Jews was fueled more by the writings of Martin Luther as transmitted by Hitler to the German Christians.

Martin Luther - "The Jews & Their Lies"

I brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule if my counsel does not please your, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews, lest we become guilty sharers before God in the lies, blasphemy, the defamation, and the curses which the mad Jews indulge in so freely and wantonly against the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, this dear mother, all Christians, all authority, and ourselves. Do not grant them protection, safeconduct, or communion with us.... .With this faithful counsel and warning I wish to cleanse and exonerate my conscience.
​

 

[ecco]

all secular ppl want humans to be simple primates in a universe indifferent to them.

It isn't about what secular people want, it's about what really is.

 

[sealchan]

There's a HUGE difference between the definition of the SCIENTIFIC theory of evolution and the definitions that the word evolution have been given over time. The SCIENTIFIC definition of the evolutionary process IS restricted to the change in biological organisms over time. However, that doesn't mean that people haven't adopted other definitions for the word. For instance I can say that my views on capital punishment have 'evolved' over the years. Thus the word evolution has ALSO come to mean a change due to external factors over a period of time.

That is changing...look up Complexity Science...it is a new area of research championed by no less than Murray Gell-Mann. It uses mathematical models to explore well-defined systems and how they change over time. These models are equally applicable to many physical systems including the evolution of biological species.

 

[sealchan]

Which protection? That I don't want to be confused by biologists or to confuse them by speaking about the evolution of the state of physical systems (after all, there is already enough confusion between terms common to both evolutionary biology and areas of machine learning which borrow extensively from living systems but then sometimes use the terminology differently)? Or that I don't think confusing the public further is going to help anyone?
Lots of terms are used in specific ways in specific fields. Public misconceptions of science (and even some misunderstanding among certain fields) is common place enough because people often conflate general meanings of words with technical ones. You see this in creationist writings, popular science, pseudoscience, and beyond.
Evolutionary theory is quite vast and quite old (most fields around today in biology and the life sciences weren't around when Darwin lived). While much is firmly established, there continues to be areas of active research across different fields from neuroscience to theoretical chemistry and astrobiology. Evolutionary theory provides the framework and foundation for much of the research here, including research that seeks to alter or extend or knowledge of evolutionary processes.
The last thing we need is to promote a view which not only encourages widespread misperceptions of the nature of evolutionary theory but actively seeks out ways in which to mislead or confuse others by conflating the terminology used in evolutionary biology and related fields and both "evolution" used more widely and as it is used by the layperson.
Evolution in general tends to imply some manner of direction or goal-oriented nature, and indeed in evolutionary algorithms the entire point of borrowing from evolutionary biology is to use models of evolutionary processes to obtain particular goals, which is antithetical to the kinds of uses of randomness (both in terms of natural selection and beyond) we find in biology. The "evolution" of the cosmos or universe or Earth is at the very minimal a global tendency, while evolutionary processes in biology are fundamentally localized. Researchers already have to go above and beyond whenever they wish to support a view in which certain features, tendencies, patterns, etc., tend to characterize evolutionary processes in general because they already need to make clear distinctions between theories concerning the origins or nature of these patterns found in evolutionary processes and evolutionary theory itself.
What you seem to seek is well beyond this or even beyond those who would suggest that evolution itself can in certain ways be seen as directed towards e.g., greater complexity or thought of in more global terms than the actual processes that take place. It is to take a simple idea as to what evolution tends to mean in common parlance, equate this with the sense used in biology, and then make connections with quite general descriptions or ideas from a wide variety of fields regarding (it would seem) anything that tends to change over time.
But these phenomena are often radically and fundamentally different.


Yes, difference equations can be insoluble, and in general so are differential equations. And both nonlinearities and high dimensional spaces make even the appropriate approximating numerical methods highly non-trivial or even impossible. But these situations (i..e., those in which the governing equations or distributions or systems are nonlinear and the number of variables, particles, functions, etc., is large) are common to QFT, signal processing, economics, statistical physics, cognitive neuroscience, aerodynamics, and on and on. In QFT and statistical physics,we're always solving integrals in dimensions so high even understanding what kind of generalized volumes we're working with becomes all but impossible. The divergences encountered in particle physics and QFT can't be regularized in any consistent manner in general (and when they can it can take a lifetime to figure out how to carry out a small number of calculations). Elsewhere we are plagued by the "curse of dimensionality" (perhaps most especially in the social and behavioral sciences) simply due to the high number of variables. Across fields and in applied math, it is basically always the case that we run into situations in which difference equations can't be well approximated by smooth functions or manifolds that can be integrated over. In these cases and more generally, a great deal of work is typically needed to figure out just how to approach finding a way towards a solution.
Thanfully, mathematicians and scientists have been working on these problems for a very long time. There are entire fields devoted to the kinds of problems one faces when dealing with complicated (nonlinear) signals (discrete or continuous). Most of the work in applied statistics (and all of "big data") concerns finding ways to work with systems in extremely high dimensions without massively ignoring issues such as multicollinearity and dependence or the loss conceptual clarity gained by dimensionality reduction methods such as PCA. Feynman diagrams and an a slew of linguistic devices have been employed for decades now in areas like HEP, statistical physics, condensed matter physics, and similar fields where it will never be possible to even approximate solutions to the evolution of systems even when we know the required integrals exist (they typically don't) because there are just too many equations governing too many "bodies" in the collective for computers to work out answers before the end of the universe.
Sometimes, work in some of these problems leads directly to progress or at least use in other fields. We see this especially with statistical methods. Perhaps more frequently, attempts are made to employ methods (especially if they sound sexy, such as anything with the word "quantum") in fields they were never attempted with little or no progress, such as in most of "econophysics" or in quantum models of cognition.

I don't see how confusing the use of the term "evolution" more than it already is currently being confused all too often is going to help anybody very much. It's not as if evolution comes equipped with a single mathematical tool, framework, approach, or scheme. Research in this field and related fields has made use of or developed a variety of mathematical tools, many of them found in systems sciences or fields that deal in particular with complexity. On the other hand, in work on complex systems we find researchers working with fuzzy sets, expert systems, non-classical probability, and a swathe of other approaches that aren't of much use in evolutionary biology.
So you have on the one hand the fact that much of the mathematical tools that you seem to refer to is being and has been developed elsewhere both thanks to evolutionary biology and independently of it, and on the other the fact that these tools are not sufficiently general for all the work being done already in systems science and complexity research. So, again, I don't see what is to be gained by claiming that the term "evolution" in evolutionary biology "not just about life." It is.



How? Newtonian mechanics isn't deterministic except insofar as differential equations are. It is when one attempts to generalize the deterministic character of Newtonian mechanics beyond where the formalism allows, i.e., to systems that aren't isolated. And furthermore much of complex systems comes from the application of these very laws as they are the differential equations whose nonlinearities lead to much of the kind of complexities you seem to wish to refer to.

I don't buy into the hard/soft distinction. In most physics, the empirical work is done by the "experimentalists" while the mathematics and theories are worked out by theorists. Historicall, mathematics wasn't seperated from either natural philosophy or the physics it became.


They started out there. In data science and in meaurement sciences much of the original work came from the earliest social scientists. In physics, similar work and more was done in the lab only in the sense that telescopes were considered to be in labs. It was all observational, not controlled labratory work. That was mainly what came to be chemistry and was some ~200 years later.
Earlier still, theologians and philosophers worked on developing the probability calculus and formal logics for use in betting.



Most of they physicists I know greatly respect experimentalists but do not consider their work to be as important because all they do is too empirically check what the theorists postulate, and
It doesn't. Partly this is because much of what is shared is due to direct borrowing in systems sciences from earlier work in evolutionary biology, which means that systems theory rests on this work not the reverse. Partly this is because systems sciences involve a vast array of paradigms which aren't found in evolutionary biology, from much of the work done in network science (which is used a lot in some areas of biology but not so much in evolutionary biology so as to much distinguish it from basic graph theory) information theoretic approaches to complexity. Partly this is because there is no singular systems theory but a wide array of concepts that have now been well developed (or abandoned, in certain cases such as catastrophe theory or similar fads) and are used across the sciences which are all interdisciplinary and have been tending away from isolated research groups in particular departments to interdepartmental institutes and the like. Partly because you have your timeline backwards.

I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

I can see you have more specific knowledge in many areas. And my argument regarding the development of physics is an historical one. With respect to cosmology certainly observations or field work have always been important, but of necessity the technology of the instruments used in a lab had to progress from those affordable to individual efforts to those requiring teams of specialists to operate let alone for an experimenter to use.

I will admit that I am cheerleading for the newer areas of research pertaining to systems theory and complexity science. I am confident that mathematical approaches to describing biological evolution will find crossover value in other sciences and vice versa. But the notion of evolution is not owned by biological scientists.

I think it is extremely short-sighted to have any concern over use of the term evolution in other sciences where common sense would dictate its use. The term quantum is heavily abused in new age circles and to my knowledge this hasn't interrupted the progress of modern physics.

The point of recognizing that evolution is not just about biology is that it helps us to recognize that the entire universe is a matter of the evolution of systems at all levels. Recognizing this helps us to take the battle to those who want to deny ToE as if it were something less than common sense or common wisdom about everything we know scientifically about the universe.

I am confident that in time this will become more and more the common understanding of those who know and appreciate the view of the universe that science gives us.