Life as Evolving Software... (Chaitin) (Humans)

by dhw, Saturday, December 31, 2011, 14:51 (4710 days ago) @ David Turell

My thanks yet again to David, who has provided us with several quotes from Stephen Jay Gould. Apparently he “tends to throw gradualism out of the window”. One quote seems to me particularly striking:

“The great majority of species do not show an appreciable evolutionary change at all. The species appear in the section [first occurrence] without obvious ancestors in the underlying beds, are stable once established and disappear higher up without leaving any descendants.” (The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 753)

On the thread ‘The Intelligent Cell’ I’ve been arguing that if there are sudden changes in the environment, adaptation would have to be rapid; similarly innovations must work straight away if they are to be of any use. I also suggested that the human species may have evolved initially as a result of a sudden, localized environmental change that brought our ancestors down from the disappearing trees to start a new way of life on the plains – with all the concomitant mental and physical adjustments. I’m not claiming that any of these ideas are original, but it would be interesting to know if the latter chimes in with Gould’s theories.

As for the mechanism, is there any more logical explanation than that of cells responding to changes in the environment by forming new combinations? This does away to a large extent with reliance on random mutations, it explains the gaps in the fossil records, and it also explains the higgledy-piggledy history of evolution with all its comings and goings. Whether such a mechanism could assemble itself by chance remains an unanswered and probably unanswerable question. I believe Gould himself was an agnostic. That speaks for itself.

Happy New Year to everyone, whether up in the trees or down on the savannah!