Evolution (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 20:03 (5595 days ago) @ David Turell

Purposeful endpoint? Hate to sound postmodern, but that&apos;s entirely dependent upon what it is that you&apos;re graphing. &#13;&#10;> &#13;&#10;> > This is as good as a recreation to what I think a &quot;random walk&quot; that Gould would be referencing. I have no clue how close I am to his argument...&#13;&#10;> &#13;&#10;> I think you have helped. Gould used a drunkard&apos;s walk to start his chapter. That example has teleology; the drunk wants to get home. But Gould&apos;s overall purpose was to say most random walks in evolution have no purpose. He didn&apos;t think through the implications of his first example. I have always admired his writing ability. I wish I could handle words so well.&#13;&#10;> &#13;&#10;> Gould wrote with an underlying bias. He profoundly believed in the contingency of random mutation. He said humans were a &apos;glorious accident&apos;. He used the Burgess Shale in Wonderful Life to drive that point home. The Shale had one protovertibrate, Pikaia (a fish). In his view that was the one lucky break to get to us. He wrote too soon. In the recent work in China shales at least 3-4 other fish have been found, obviously different species. So much for contingency. When evolution explodes, it obviously explodes in several branches at the same level with several species. This is Conway Morris&apos; theory of convergence, which wins the day. Humans are not contingent, which leads me to suspect that the directionality of evolution to the more complex is built into DNA/RNA. And so I have brought the discussion back to teleology. - You have... but I&apos;ll need some insight to continue... - In my perspective, the tendency for DNA/RNA is to conserve information. I did take some things with my from my time in biochem labs, specifically types of errors that are introduced into the code that don&apos;t damage the organism. Any uncaught change in DNA/RNA that isn&apos;t deleterious will simply be conserved and passed on. It is a machine of accretion. Claiming any kind of a teleology when the most recognizable process (economics) also has no purpose, is a rather difficult proposition. I see no reason that the economics analogy cannot also apply to the genome, and I think it presents a real challenge to the idea of a teleology. There is no end goal to the economy, all the economy is, is a graphing of the wealth of a nation. To me, graphing the complexity of life simply shows an accretion of genetic &quot;wealth&quot; over time when looking at all organisms. There is no holistic point to it. At least I can&apos;t fathom one. Each individual in an economy or a genome in life simply tries to &quot;stay alive,&quot; as it were. - I&apos;ve heard arguments before (from my Process buddy) that the movement towards complexity &quot;seems to be moving somewhere&quot; but I think that this is an instance of mistaking the forest for the trees. &quot;Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,&quot; to quote Freud. - What would be your measure of complexity? There are worms that have a more complex genome than ours, yet I doubt one would argue that the movement towards complexity ends in a nematode. This then leads to the question that complexity maybe isn&apos;t caused by DNA/RNA, but by something else... but now you&apos;re getting into a thornier bush--Gene regulation and expression. (where &quot;junk DNA&quot; likely plays its role.) - <wild supposition>&#13;&#10;It&apos;s possible I suppose to use an analagous argument, stating that the DNA is the library but that the rest of our machinery is somewhat free to make mistakes--like human consciousness. In this view consciousness is a transitory state between processing and the read/write of our memory. Analogously, changes happen between DNA-->RNA-->Protein-->Trait and may or may not be corrected. But even in this analogy there is no discernible teleology for our own consciousness, much less that of the genome. &#13;&#10;</wild supposition>

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\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"