'Darwin's finches' revert to type

english.aljazeera.net ^ | May 4, 2006

[RightWingAtheist]

Hey I got the prime!

[csense]

Your posts are delightful to read.

Aren't they though....

Betty, thank you for those wonderful posts, and thank you you for your time.

[Ole Okie]

So now the birds have a smaller pecker?

Good one!

I look outside my windows at the finch feeders in my yard. The goldfinches are monopolizing them right now, but I also have house finches feeding there.

For the life of me, I can't tell whether or not they have smaller peckers.

Even my micrometer calibrated eyeballs can't tell.

[betty boop]

Hello YHAOS! Yeah, ya gotta laugh or you’ll go crazy. :^)

It’s good to learn you're interested in information theory. Indeed, information seems to be essential to an understanding biological life, as even Richard Dawkins acknowledges. The problems are (among other things) where does the information “come from,” and how is it utilized by biological systems?

I’ve seen a speculative study, currently in unpublished manuscript form, which attempts to address this issue. I’m not at liberty to say much about it, but could maybe indicate the general train of the investigation by some very general remarks.

Biological systems all have a physical basis. Therefore, the laws of physics and chemistry pertain to them. But it seems that the physical laws are insufficiently “information rich” to account for the type of self-organizing complexity we see in even simple biological systems.

Now as I understand it, algorithmic information is measured by the length of a sequence of symbols that cannot be given by a shorter length of sequence. Further, the complexity that one can obtain with coupled algorithms may be estimated as the product of the complexity of the coupled algorithms. Any algorithm contains only static information. If the coupling is prescribed, and static, the arising complexity will also be finite and numerically determinable.

Now it appears we have dynamic information flux at the deepest level of biological organization. We have to recognize that, say, a human being is a living system constituted by myriads (of virtually astronomical number) of living subcomponents all of which are synergistically cooperating to express the totality of the living system itself. This is, to me, the “information deficit” that has not been explained.

Also consider the fact that the laws of physics have a very low information content, since their algorithmic complexity can be characterized, as Chaitin did in 1977, by a computer program of less than a few thousand characters. In a 2004 personal communication, he writes:

“My paper on physics was never published, only as an IBM report. In it I took: Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s laws, the Schrodinger equation, and Einstein’s field eqns for curved spacetime near a black hole, and solved them numerically, giving “motion-picture” solutions. The programs, which were written in an obsolete computer programming language APL2 at roughly the level of Mathematica, were all about half a page long, which is amazingly simple.”

It seems unreasonable to expect that static algorithmic couplings of physico-chemical laws alone account for the generation of the 10²² bits s^–1 of biological information flux, which is the estimate of the informational requirement calculated in this study.

It has become standard to imagine that DNA must be the information source. But a major finding of this paper suggests that DNA has the same problem as the physico-chemical laws in that it is not sufficiently information rich to do the job we task it to perform; i.e., to account for the high-order information needed to coordinate everything from the level of cellular reactions to the global “parts-to-whole organizational problem,” as we might call it. The information content of DNA has been estimated in this study as between 10⁹ bits and 10¹³ bits s^–1. It seems clear that still leaves a rather enormous “information deficit” that must be accounted for.

Or as the author puts it: “If DNA itself lacks sufficient informational capability in its sequential information as well as in its thermodynamic capacity for the government of cellular reactions, what is the source of the above found huge biological information?

To me, it’s just such a fascinating problem! This is only a very oversimplified sketch of a current effort to explicate it. I wish I could say more about that effort here; but I have to wait until the book is published first, which I hope may be soon.

Thanks so much for writing, YHAOS!

[betty boop]

Throughout his life Marco was interested in (and therefore passionately interested in) the many flaws in the Darwinian theory of evolution as it is commonly presented. In 1967 he participated in a remarkable conference at the Wistar Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, which brought together a collection of renowned physical scientists and mathematicians, on the one hand, and life scientists, on the other. At that meeting Marco became one of the first distinguished scientists in the world to point out that a theory of evolution that depends on uniformly randomly occurring mutations cannot be the truth because the number of mutations needed to create the speciation that we observe, and the time that would be needed for those mutations to have happened by chance, exceed by thousands of orders of magnitude the time that has been available.

Oh, thank you so much for the links to Schutzenberger, JC!!! I read a paper of his a couple years back and found him totally fascinating and delightful! Looks like I ought to be studying him further.

Thanks so much for writing!

[betty boop]

Thanks, hosepipe!

[betty boop]

Thank you so much csense, and JCEccles, for your very kind words! You are both delightful correspondents!

[YHAOS]

”information seems to be essential to an understanding biological life”

I think it’s a key to several things, though surely not the only key. Thanks for the update. I very much appreciate it, even though I don’t understand it all.

It was fifteen years ago, or a little more, when I first encountered the term. Along ‘bout the same time as I heard of nanotech. My grasp that both were important was more intuitive than anything else, but I also understood that the Art Bell in them had to be washed out before they would be of any real value. Back then I worked for a living, so those issues, and a number of others, had to go on the back burner. Now, I can spend a little time on them, so your interest and knowledge is a most fortuitous circumstance.

Thanks for your responsiveness and your willingness to share.

[Stingray]

"Strictly speaking, Darwin did not write about a direction to evolution (better and better, for instance) but spoke only of change."

From Darwin himself:

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin/chapter4.html

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin/chapter14.html

You may want to read Darwin before you presume to quote him.

[DBrow]

Darwin was clearly talking about natural selection leading to a form adapted to the conditions that the creature found itself in. The creature continues to perfect its functions and form to meet the local conditions. The underlined portion of your first quote supports that interpretation.

The last part of the second paragraph you quote expresses his wonder at the beauty of the amazing variety. No surprise, we are capable of wonder. The first part says that in Darwin's view natural selection leads to complexity, and he tags the more complex animals as "higher animals". He could just as easily said "more complex animals".

My earlier comment was making the point that Darwin did not see "improvement" from a strictly anthropocentric view- his concept of "better" was a form more adapted to its local conditions. Many read Darwin from a human viewpoint, that "more evolved" means more perfect from our point of view and not from the viewpoint of the process. Thus, the concept that we humans are "more evolved" than some other species and therefore "better" than that other.

So a complex creature gradually changing to a less complex one to meet the demands of its environment is, to Darwin, improvement and advancement. To many people I have spoken with, this Darwinian betterment is seen as degradation, downward evolution, or devolution.

He did not see evolution as necessarily leading to a crown of creation, an endpoint of perfection, some evolutionary goal, but change to adapt.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2009

[js1138]

Actually evolution is not change in order to adapt. It is simply change.

If there are variants that have statistically more offspring than other variants, then their alleles will become more common in the population.

If the available variants don't include better adaptations, extinction is always a possibility. But the variants don't know where they are headed.

[DBrow]

Yup, I agree. Even the observers don't know where the observed specie is headed, and there is no "goal".

[js1138]

Even worse, the designers can't know where things are headed. The complexity of the ecosystem exceeds the complexity of a weather system by orders of magnitude.

One can always assert that God knows everything, but this is a religious statement not accessible to science. No finite designer could anticipate all the elements of an ecosystem.

[Stingray]

Sorry. You parse words and ask us what "is" is. I cited your source himself.

Read him without your "change for change's sake" goggles on.

Furthermore, I have a long, distant history of dealing with such issues on this board, and have shown repeatedly by the writings of the evols themselves, how so much of evolution's arguments amount to nothing more than silly, circular, semantic games.

Do a search and you'll see that your position - along with those of your cohort here - has already been more than adequately addressed and refuted.

Buh-bye.

[DBrow]

OK, Stingray, Buh-bye.