As some of my farflung correspondents are aware, I try to keep abreast, in layperson's terms, of developments in science, especially cosmology, astronomy, geology and biology. Perhaps a welcome respite from politics, here are a couple of insights from a conversation between Sean Carroll and Addy Pross, who is something of a philosopher as well as evolutionary biologist.
1. Survival of the fittest isn't really a good summary of the evolutionary imperative. It's more that systems that persist have a tendency to develop complexity in order to do a better job of persisting, and persistence in time is the only measure of "success" of any dynamic kinetic metastable system. Of which life, as it has evolved on Earth and perhaps elsewhere, is the pinnacle. It can be said as a tautology: That which persists persists and that which does not does not. But really, this is exactly how evolution works. At every level, the ability to persist, as a pattern or template of a dynamic kinetic systems where free energy fuels not only the flow of energy but the persistence of the template itself, determines the course of evolution. Increasing complexity to overcome chaos and threats to the persistence of the pattern is the observable result, but not a predetermined "design" or intention. Although it becomes hard to pin down just where "purpose" comes in, and just when and how sensory feedback loops start to cross the threshold into self-awareness and strategy, but clearly these things do emerge as part of the template persistence paradigm. It just takes a long time. But so far, every time we think we're so smart, like inventing the CRISPR system for editing genes, it turns out to be something life invented on its own millions or even billions of years ago.
2. A fountain is a DKS. The water always changes, just as all the molecules of your body are changed out within a few years, but the pattern persists. There is a continual flow of free energy to waste energy (heat). Same with life, but life has the added element of dynamic control of the flow of energy. This is the essence of what life is: stable patterns that have the capacity to autonomically maintain a net flow of energy. It's not the energy which seems to defy the rules of entropy, but the template or pattern itself. And what makes life different from a waterfall or a hurricane is that it also includes a pattern, or template, for maintaining the flow of energy.
3. The genome is not, as usually thought, a read-only system of encoding all that is needed to form an organism. Rather, it is a read-write library which the organism, itself as a whole patterned to maintain itself in a stable state, uses to "look up" what it needs to produce the incredibly complex chemistry (including time and space design elements) that make the persistence of the DKS itself possible. The pattern that persists is not fully encoded in the genome or anywhere else, it simply is; the entire organism, indeed in a sense the entirety of life on Earth (Gaia?) is the persistent pattern, and it is always tending towards greater complexity in order to maintain persistence (or survival if you prefer) itself. This is why organisms incorporate a bit of viral DNA into their own genome... they learn from it what they need to avoid vulnerability to that particular threat to persistence. DNA is just a means of storing information; evolution acts on the organisms and even ecosystems themselves. This is more or less in direct contradiction to Dawkins's "selfish gene" theory. It's not that organisms are just reflections of the genome. It is organisms that participate in evolution; their genes are their major tool of "remembering" their strategies and techniques for success, but they don't exist apart from the overall organism and even its relationship with other organisms, independently. A DNA molecule, or even an entire chromosome, left lying on the table, will quickly decay into chaos and dissipate; what makes it alive is that it is part of a DKS that maintains itself through a whole host of elements, of which information storage, though crucial, is only one.
4. It is the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of the formation of such dynamic stability that maintains itself by "learning" to channel free energy that gives all of nature structure. The universe is not a rarified gas of particles that don't interact, although such universes are possible and may even exist in the multiverse. But in this universe, at a level of physics and chemistry, the emergence of dynamic kinetic stability gives us structure like stars and galaxies, and planets with oceans, and on a level where increasing complexity eventually results in the ability to actually control the channeling of energy, it results in life. It is all but impossible to imagine that this emergence, of stable dynamic kinetic systems of increasing complexity resulting in more and more successful persistence, which we call life, has only ever occurred one time, on this lonely little planet in a vast cosmos. Possible, theoretically, but hard to imagine how it could be, given the obvious fact that, given the laws of physics and chemistry which we imagine to be essentially universal, it is possible... since it happened here, and indeed pretty soon after it first became possible, given the emergence of conducive conditions.
There, something to think about other than the existential threat to democracy and our way of life going on around us at this particular time.
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