Biological complexity: homeostasis (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 24, 2018, 11:18 (2011 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID’s comment (under “animals eat fruit”): Fascinating interdependence in the balance of nature, which is beautifully illustrated in this article. Note 'red in tooth and claw' is not involved. Lots of balance in nature is not competitive killing.

dhw: It’s about time you caught up with Lynn Margulis, who pointed out 50 years ago that cooperation was just as important as competition.

DAVID: I been touting balance of nature all along, and you've down played it!

dhw: It is interdependence or cooperation between organisms that is highlighted, as opposed to competition. As I keep pointing out, your “balance of nature” changes with every success and every failure. I really don’t know why you are so desperate to tout it.

DAVID: Not desperate, but insistent to reverse each time you downplay as again here. Each econiche is carefully balanced naturally as long as as top predator is not displaced. It is a form of natural homeostasis.

Yes, each econiche is balanced so long as it is balanced, and when it is not balanced it is replaced by another econiche. And the new econiche is balanced until it is not balanced...And you moan about the tautology of “natural selection”!

DAVID: …And life’s diversity must be present to maintain the balance.

dhw: What “balance” does life maintain? As above, the diversity, linked to constantly changing conditions, is what keeps CHANGING the balance!

DAVID: Maintaining any living organism requires a balance of a large variety of living mechanisms in that organism.

Obviously. And when the balance is disturbed, the organism falls ill and/or dies. What is your point? You have not answered my question “what balance”? There is no such thing as THE balance which life maintains. Balance changes as conditions change, and diversity results from change – it does not “maintain THE balance”.

DAVID: Gleick's book,Chaos, 1987, points out how much order is really hidden in chaos. I have no disagreement with your points. What I see built-in into the history of the Earth is a drive to complexity and improvement of conditions, wich I think demonstrates God's work.

TONY: I think that much of 'chaos' is simply order that we don't understand yet. But I still can't help thinking that some chaos is introduced and is necessary for life.

dhw: I also see a drive to complexity and improvement, though simplicity survives without improvement in the form of bacteria. And I agree that some “chaos” (e.g. environmental change) is necessary for evolution, since the alternative would be stasis. If there is a God, one might regard the chaos as integral to the interest of the great spectacle (how boring it would be if everything was predictable). If there is no God, order and chaos are the natural outcome of first cause energy and matter constantly forming and re-forming themselves.

DAVID: Back to humanizing God as being bored.

Back to your purposeful God whose possible purpose we mustn’t discuss, although he is like us but is not like us.