Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, May 27, 2016, 13:04 (3102 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Once the new species was established, conditions may have changed, or it may subsequently have moved to different environments, but if it has been successful, it will survive. …In other words, the new complexities resulted from the drive for survival/improvement and were not an end in themselves.
DAVID: I agree success is present if a new form survives. but I am not convinced that your Darwinian approach of seeking improvement for survival is correct. Since (as Denton shows) there are basic patterns from which everything develops, and everything certainly becomes more complex even unto unreasonable forms, I still hold to the view that making organisms more complex is the driving mechanism in evolution. […] We see punctuated jumps in fossils, fully formed and functioning new animals, not Darwin's tiny steps. This can only occur if giant steps in complexity occur. Then the issue of superiority in survival takes over.-We have long since agreed that gradualism (tiny steps) is out. My approach is not “seeking improvement for survival”. Survival may be one spur for innovation (the giraffe and the whale), but I keep stressing that changes in the environment may not be a threat - they may also allow for new opportunities/improvements. An increase in oxygen, waters receding, climate change…Of course this means saltation and not tiny steps, and of course the development of new structures means greater complexity. -DAVID: I am open to a complexity drive, and if your concept is in play, God keeps on eye on everything, and steps in if he doesn't like an outcome. This means He gets his desired end results. It is a reasonable alternative.-Thank you. That gets rid of “always guiding” and grants autonomy to the inventive mechanism, which you prefer to call a complexification mechanism. -dhw: If your dcm is autonomous, it is exactly the same as mine, except that you give it a different motivation: it wants to be more complex for the sake of complexity, whereas mine becomes more complex because it wants to survive and/or improve.
DAVID: 'Wanting' is very anthropomorphic, isn't it? Complexity, if it works, is always improvement. Of course, what we see in the fossil record are the improved forms. We don't see the failures, only the comings and goings of successful species through the ages due to extinctions, which it has been shown are usually just bad luck with the environment.-Why is ‘wanting' anthropomorphic? Other organisms don't speak English, but that doesn't mean they don't understand the experience of survival, danger, hunger, pain - or even improvement. I would reverse your next statement: improvement is (almost) always complexity. As for failures, either organisms cannot adapt to new environments (bad luck) or they fail in their quest for improvement (a fish explores the land, and goes too far from the water). But you would say they fail in their attempts to become more complex for no reason other than to become more complex.