Evolution: a different view (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, April 22, 2016, 15:22 (3136 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw:If Wagner can tell us exactly how life began, and exactly how a law of physics can “inevitably” transform comparatively primitive, single-celled organisms into dinosaurs, dogs, humming birds and humans, he might have a case.
DAVID: No, he's not describing OOL, but how easily evolution might search for new molecules and gene networks.-Actually, there are several references to OOL, but they are not Wagner's. You yourself quoted the conclusion of the article:
"These ideas suggest that evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself....Manfred Eigen, who insists that Darwinian evolution is not merely the organizing principle of biology but a “law of physics,” an inevitable result of how information is organized in complex systems. And if that's right, it would seem that the appearance of life was not a fantastic fluke but almost a mathematical inevitability." (My bold)-As regards the problem of innovation, I think the following passages are also revealing:
“Take, for example, the discovery within the field of evolutionary developmental biology that the different body plans of many complex organisms, including us, arise not from different genes but from different networks of gene interaction and expression in the same basic circuit, called the Hox gene circuit.”-If gene interaction and expression are key factors in evolutionary development, and if we accept that all innovations have to entail cooperation between cell communities within existing organisms (common descent, as opposed to separate creation), it seems to me increasingly difficult to ignore the possibility that these communities work out their own form of development, bearing in mind the following: “The structure of these combinatorial landscapes of biomolecules then enables nature to make bold and creative innovations rather than being forever consigned to making incremental variations on what already exists...” Nature is not an external engineer that “makes” innovations. Innovation is the result of interaction between individual organisms and environmental conditions, and it requires the organisms to be aware of conditions and to have an internal mechanism that will utilize them.
 
“...Evolution need only take a random walk along a web of neutral (or at least almost neutral) mutations, that, without impairing the fitness of an organism, surrounds it with very different neighbors: innovative solutions to selective pressures that are there for the taking when the circumstances compel it. Through this neutral drift, organisms can reach locations in phase space which would not have been accessible by strictly adaptive mutation from their original starting position.”-I do not see evolution as solely the result of compulsion. As we have said, there was then no need for any advance beyond bacteria, and all that was required was adaptation. Nor do I see why the walk has to be random, and I find the whole “walk” image unconvincing, as I do the “landscape” image. If common descent is true (and I believe it is), then all innovations must take place WITHIN existing organisms, and that means cells must organize their own mutations (in the sense of innovative changes). Your theory, David, has always been that cells do this according to divine preprogramming or divine interference. My alternative is that they do it because they have their own inventive intelligence (perhaps designed by your God). Neither of us accepts randomness or the restriction to circumstances of compulsion (which only demand adaptation). It seems to me that the essay provides no answer to the mysteries of how life and the mechanisms for evolution came into being, or how innovation actually takes place. We know that all the component parts are there, and it is interesting to hear that there are many different ways of reaching the same solution, but that is a far cry from proving that life and evolution were “almost a mathematical inevitability”(though one should note the word “almost”).