This article is an excerpt from Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution (2021), where Richard Dawkins explores how nature and human innovation have mastered the challenge of flight
Amoeba and Einstein, I agree. Einstein has more wiggle room to escape death than the amoeba.
But Karl Popper was all for Active Darwinism and not the passive one Dawkins has described.
Popper also believed that all life is problem-solving. Whereas Dawkins has argued that natural selection is the main moulder, undermining the very bird that tried to evade predation.
This is one of the issues I have with natural selection - the assumption of the passivity
Thanks for the comment. I teach personal finance in Kazakhstan. Philosophy is closer to me than biology. Read my posts on Substrack. I'm interested in your opinion.
Interesting. Will check them out. Maybe you could share one post, for instance, a link to it, that you would definitely recommend for a first timer like myself interested in your work.
Yet again you personify something you claim is random. The real question is can you show how life and evolution began? Can you even tell us what we should consider to be life?
Evolution is not random anymore than your car is a fuel tank. A component of a thing is not the complete thing.
Also the process has very little to do with how life started. Might as well ask why models of gravity can't tell you anything about the proper way to cook pasta.
On the occasion of observing a man-made design and a natural design unit, the improved and latest version will have to align with the laws of physics, chemistry etc. The absolute, permanent universal laws of reality.
The betterment, the evolution, then constitutes a closer alignment, a higher acceptance of the absolute quality of the surrounding.
The functional core of the improvement can only be considered on the change, enrichment of the information within the unit to the better acceptance or use of the law. This is the evolution.
Initially we can discard whether the evolution is targeted or blind, meaning we work toward a new feature or we simply trying to exist, (row power of repletion). In either case the information needs to be encoded in matter.
Here lies the difference with life, whereas is more likely for the airplane to evolve from chance.
Compared to an inert object, even to a complicated object, life must do other functions.
1. Must establish a border between self and the surrounding, this information about self must be encoded within (preserve the self)
2. Must preserve the self and live, interact with the surrounding in various situations, information about changing surrounding (live)
3. Must reproduce a copy of the self. (reproduce)
The hardware, the mechanism for all these functions is different, the goals are different. The car or the airplane in comparison will have only one half of these functions. Wherever being used falls.
The failure of the natural evolution explanation is Time, it is a matter of fact that evolution is a geometric progression. With the natural explanation the evolution should slow down as it evolves not speed up. Speeding up means that the desired information is selected and added as we go along. It means that there is an intentional decoding of the information.
The magical assumption of the natural selection is that the initial choice, the better choice in life, the one that gets the reward does not matter. Assumptions are not science.
Even with this magical assumption, still back to the paragraph one the absolute laws are the decisive factor, the reasonable and unreasonable thought if honest on the conclusion will bow the head and praise God!
Of course the real miracle is sexual reproduction which allows selection to "work on" mutiple problems simultaneously. Otherwise evolution would have to solve the problems sequentially.
How did it come about? Why would a species that could simply clone itself waste all that effort create a dangerous and energy intensive system like sexual reproduction ?
WHY: Because it enables the sharing and recombining of successful mutations. The species without it got left behind and died out, either because they couldn't keep up with habitat change or cos their sexually reproducing predators and parasites could evolve faster than they did and their defenses were outmanoeuvred.
How: is harder to answer but it goes back 2 billion years to before animals, plants and fungi separated.
Yeah but that implies thought on behalf of a designer doesn't it? Say there were a million of an animal in the world, one creates sexual reproduction which involves an increadible amount of luck and danger to the animal, what's the upside? It can only breed with itself. As for the how, tell me, don't send me links please.
So where's the advantage in creating an expensive, in terms of energy, form of reproduction? Just as you might get better genes for your offspring you could easily get worse.
It benefits populations long-term, not necessarily every family.
It clearly works or it wouldn't have been selected for.
Primitive forms like bacteria have their own equivalent system, it's just not a efficient, so you can think of it as an improvement on what went before.
It also means having two copies of every chromosome instead of only one, and this gives several benefits: you've got more DNA so you can drive your cell faster, the two copies can be slightly different which means you produce two slightly different proteins which function slightly differently so you can cope with environmental variation, and finally if one if faulty, you have a backup.
Humans and Evolution use the same process actually - in Evolution, the model which is adjusted is DNA -based; with Humans the model which adjusts is language-based. Reproductive systems turn DNA into an organism, human use mechanical systems to turn language into a device. language evolves much faster than DNA.
There are things our language has to evolve to describe, it’s a slower process than engineering - particle systems, statistical ensembles are relatively new and hard.
Indeed. The comparison of natural selection and design is fascinating. I wonder if human evolution is coming to a halt with modern medicine and future gene editing?
Is there any evidence of feedback to the genetic material of organisms, enabling actualisation of Linnaeus' concept of "strive to evolve". niko.kopke@gmail.com
Karl Popper. Amoeba and Einstein
Amoeba and Einstein, I agree. Einstein has more wiggle room to escape death than the amoeba.
But Karl Popper was all for Active Darwinism and not the passive one Dawkins has described.
Popper also believed that all life is problem-solving. Whereas Dawkins has argued that natural selection is the main moulder, undermining the very bird that tried to evade predation.
This is one of the issues I have with natural selection - the assumption of the passivity
Thanks for the comment. I teach personal finance in Kazakhstan. Philosophy is closer to me than biology. Read my posts on Substrack. I'm interested in your opinion.
Interesting. Will check them out. Maybe you could share one post, for instance, a link to it, that you would definitely recommend for a first timer like myself interested in your work.
My recent publication
https://orken73.substack.com/p/laws-of-nature
Yet again you personify something you claim is random. The real question is can you show how life and evolution began? Can you even tell us what we should consider to be life?
Evolution is not random anymore than your car is a fuel tank. A component of a thing is not the complete thing.
Also the process has very little to do with how life started. Might as well ask why models of gravity can't tell you anything about the proper way to cook pasta.
I don't think this kind of personification is bad in any way. He talks about this in the preface of 30th edition of The Selfish Gene I think.
On the occasion of observing a man-made design and a natural design unit, the improved and latest version will have to align with the laws of physics, chemistry etc. The absolute, permanent universal laws of reality.
The betterment, the evolution, then constitutes a closer alignment, a higher acceptance of the absolute quality of the surrounding.
The functional core of the improvement can only be considered on the change, enrichment of the information within the unit to the better acceptance or use of the law. This is the evolution.
Initially we can discard whether the evolution is targeted or blind, meaning we work toward a new feature or we simply trying to exist, (row power of repletion). In either case the information needs to be encoded in matter.
Here lies the difference with life, whereas is more likely for the airplane to evolve from chance.
Compared to an inert object, even to a complicated object, life must do other functions.
1. Must establish a border between self and the surrounding, this information about self must be encoded within (preserve the self)
2. Must preserve the self and live, interact with the surrounding in various situations, information about changing surrounding (live)
3. Must reproduce a copy of the self. (reproduce)
The hardware, the mechanism for all these functions is different, the goals are different. The car or the airplane in comparison will have only one half of these functions. Wherever being used falls.
The failure of the natural evolution explanation is Time, it is a matter of fact that evolution is a geometric progression. With the natural explanation the evolution should slow down as it evolves not speed up. Speeding up means that the desired information is selected and added as we go along. It means that there is an intentional decoding of the information.
The magical assumption of the natural selection is that the initial choice, the better choice in life, the one that gets the reward does not matter. Assumptions are not science.
Even with this magical assumption, still back to the paragraph one the absolute laws are the decisive factor, the reasonable and unreasonable thought if honest on the conclusion will bow the head and praise God!
Of course the real miracle is sexual reproduction which allows selection to "work on" mutiple problems simultaneously. Otherwise evolution would have to solve the problems sequentially.
How did it come about? Why would a species that could simply clone itself waste all that effort create a dangerous and energy intensive system like sexual reproduction ?
You are right. I suggest you do not waste energy on this.
WHY: Because it enables the sharing and recombining of successful mutations. The species without it got left behind and died out, either because they couldn't keep up with habitat change or cos their sexually reproducing predators and parasites could evolve faster than they did and their defenses were outmanoeuvred.
How: is harder to answer but it goes back 2 billion years to before animals, plants and fungi separated.
More here: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/sexual-reproduction-and-the-evolution-of-sex-824
Yeah but that implies thought on behalf of a designer doesn't it? Say there were a million of an animal in the world, one creates sexual reproduction which involves an increadible amount of luck and danger to the animal, what's the upside? It can only breed with itself. As for the how, tell me, don't send me links please.
It happened quite early on. The others (mostly) didn't survive.
So where's the advantage in creating an expensive, in terms of energy, form of reproduction? Just as you might get better genes for your offspring you could easily get worse.
Why do you think it's particularly expensive?
It benefits populations long-term, not necessarily every family.
It clearly works or it wouldn't have been selected for.
Primitive forms like bacteria have their own equivalent system, it's just not a efficient, so you can think of it as an improvement on what went before.
It also means having two copies of every chromosome instead of only one, and this gives several benefits: you've got more DNA so you can drive your cell faster, the two copies can be slightly different which means you produce two slightly different proteins which function slightly differently so you can cope with environmental variation, and finally if one if faulty, you have a backup.
Imagine all the great evolutionary advances that were annihilated by casual error.
Human morality evolved before humans did
https://open.substack.com/pub/douglasj/p/human-morality-was-largely-developed?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6980s
https://open.substack.com/pub/juliorenealfonso/p/entropy-versus-evolution
That doesn't answer my questions, don't send me anti-scientific links again please.
Also, looking at the first paragraph, why does the universe have laws?
Humans and Evolution use the same process actually - in Evolution, the model which is adjusted is DNA -based; with Humans the model which adjusts is language-based. Reproductive systems turn DNA into an organism, human use mechanical systems to turn language into a device. language evolves much faster than DNA.
There are things our language has to evolve to describe, it’s a slower process than engineering - particle systems, statistical ensembles are relatively new and hard.
Why is it DNA? How did that come about? You think that was random?
Certainly.
What's your evidence for that?
All other pathways are thermodynamically infeasible.
The Universe is always tending toward an equilibrium state and the planet is in anything but an equilibrium state.
It’s called entropy.
That's an assertion, what's your evidence for that?
Indeed. The comparison of natural selection and design is fascinating. I wonder if human evolution is coming to a halt with modern medicine and future gene editing?
Is there any evidence of feedback to the genetic material of organisms, enabling actualisation of Linnaeus' concept of "strive to evolve". niko.kopke@gmail.com
Well said! ‘No thought goes into it, no clever ideas..’. And no purpose, either. Some birds are flightless. But they survive all the same.
You think there is no purpose to evolution?