[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

Here is your post #5 repeated for easier reading for Lurkers:

article: “Examples of the latter [are] a river flowing down a slope...

you: Curiously enough, rivers are *forever* flowing down slopes. And they can keep that up because there are numerous other mechanisms at work... such as evaporation and rain, a cycle driven by an external energy source (the sun).

With such a basic blunder (vast oversimplification), seems a waste to spend a whole lot of time worrying about his concerns regarding the improbability of evolution. Anyone who can't even see the sun in the sky overhead is not someone who is likely to have much useful to say about whether or not evolution is "directed."

But this is the whole paragraph from which the subject sentence was extracted:

He continues: “Examples of the latter [are] a river flowing down a slope, or heat flowing down a gradient. We can elaborate this discussion … by including examples of autocatakinetic systems … such as the Benard experiment, tornadoes, and dust devils, systems that we call self-organizing, but we do not say are characterized by intentional dynamics. The autocatakinesis of such systems, which breaks symmetry with previously disordered regimes to access and dynamically fill higher-ordered dimensions of space time, is still determined with respect to local potentials with which they typically remain permanently connected. The autocatakinesis of living things, in contrast, is maintained with respect to non-local potentials discontinuously located in space-time to which they are not permanently connected.”

Swenson observes autocatakinesis in strictly physical processes – such as tornadoes – which are determined with respect to local potentials with which they remain permanently connected. He is neither raising nor disputing the physical mechanism of water nor is he disputing the second law of thermodynamics. And he is clearly recognizing self-organizing complexity in such physical processes.

Nor is he declaring an improbability of evolution. He is putting evolution in the greater context – the evolution of one - that there are more than physical processes at work in the emergence and evolution of life.

The theory of evolution itself does not ask or answer the question "what is life?".

I very strongly agree with Swenson that more than physical processes are necessary to explain the emergence and evolution of the biosphere – as do many mathematicians and physicists who are working in the following areas of investigation:

information (successful communication)
autonomy (individual, molecular machinery, organism, collectives of organisms)
semiosis (language, encoding/decoding)
complexity (Kolmogorov, self-organizing, physical, functional, metatransition, etc.)
intelligence (memory and problem solving)

If you have an explanation for any of the above which is by physical processes alone then, by all means, please let us know! In the meantime, the researchers will no doubt continue to look to the mathematics which are themselves non-corporeals (non-spatial, non-temporal).

[orionblamblam]

> The theory of evolution itself does not ask or answer the question "what is life?".

Nor does the theory of relativity ask or answer the question "what is light?".

> I very strongly agree with Swenson that more than physical processes are necessary to explain the emergence and evolution of the biosphere

Sadly for you and Swenson, lab experiments have shown that basic physical processes are quite up to the task. No magic needed.


> If you have an explanation for any of the above which is by physical processes alone...

Yes. As to "information:" It's stunningly obvious, and I'm always amazed that people choose to ignore the obvious physical nature of it. A very short gene sequences adds another term, via replication error or whatever; the mere addition of another gene is more information, just as adding one letter at random to a word is more information. Whether that information is useful or not is something the environment will determine, based on its effects on the gene sequence/organism as a whole. If it's a net positive, it stays. If a negative, it dies. Just that simple. Increased genes = increased information.

As to the rest, I fail to see why you need to resort to magic to explain 'em.