Schutzenberger's Folly, part 2
I will proceed by quoting another piece from the Schutzenberger
interview, and then generously ( :-) providing critical commentary.
This may be the last installment because I'm pretty tired of
Schutzenberger already. But he does provide debating points which
allow me to make some of my general points about evolution, etc.
The full text of the interview may be seen at
http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od172/schutz172.htm
If you choose to read it, be forewarned: It may make you feel sick.
Here goes:
Q: What is it that makes functional complexity so difficult to
comprehend?
S: The evolution of living creatures appears to require an essential
ingredient, a specific form of organization. Whatever it is, it lies
beyond anything that our present knowledge of physics or chemistry
might suggest; it is a property upon which formal logic sheds
absolutely no light. Whether gradualists or saltationists, Darwinians
have too simple a conception of biology, rather like a locksmith
improbably convinced that his handful of keys will open any lock.
Darwinians, for example, tend to think of the gene rather as if it
were the expression of a simple command: do this, get that done,
drop that side chain. Walter Gehring's work on the regulatory genes
controlling the development of the insect eye reflects this
conception. The relevant genes may well function this way, but the
story on this level is surely incomplete, and Darwinian theory is not
apt to fill in the pieces.
Chris
The first sentence is true, *except* for the word "specific." Living
creatures require a kind of organization that has certain properties,
but there is no need for that organization to be a very specific form.
Indeed, the fact that we have so many fairly radical variations on
life, even though life on Earth is currently all (or nearly all) based
on DNA, indicates that we have to be careful about this issue. Life
must be able to use energy, ultimately in the furtherance of it's own
continued existence (including, in an abstract sense, the continued
existence of its genetic information). This limits the physical forms,
but not to a very narrow band of them. This is why some people
claim, in all seriousness, that certain computer "viruses" and
artificial life "organisms" are *in fact* living things. I'm inclined to
agree with them, but not strongly enough to make it an issue. The
point is that the basic requirement for a living thing are startlingly
simple: A living thing is an "entity" that has equivalent to
metabolism used to support its continued existence and/or the
continued existence of its core informational structure (its "genes"
or equivalent). This leaves a lot of room for *different* structures,
as long as this is their effect.
But further, while the forms of life that we know of today seem to
be quite complex, their seems to be no *inherent* need, in principle,
for the functional complexity that most forms of life exhibit.
As to the locksmith simile, a better one would be that of
mathematics, in which a small number of primitive operations and
concepts yields an infinity of mathematical ideas. The basic
*empirical* principle of branching replication with seemingly
random variations is sufficient, as a frigging *mathematician*
should know, to generate a tree with an infinity of "branches, with a
different organism as each "leaf" All that prevents it from doing so
are the various things that prevent reproduction of all or some of the
genotypes involved. The general term for that collection of factors is
"selection." This is the exclusion of some genotypes from
reproduction. That is, in the real world, the branching and variation
processes are limited by such factors as insufficient resources or
biologically "wrong" genetic information, predators, etc.
By the very nature of the replication and branching-by-variation,
*if* it is random, it must, for all practical purposes, achieve *every*
kind of complexity unless something *prevents* it from doing so.
Did Schutzenberger, the *mathematician* not understand this fairly
basic idea? Was he *not* familiar with the simple idea of a
branching binary "tree" of possibilities? How could this be?
My guess is that he *was* familiar with it, but chose to ignore it so
he could shill for anti-Darwinism.
Finally, consider the last three sentences in the paragraph:
Darwinians, for example, tend to think of the gene
rather as if it were the expression of a simple
command: do this, get that done, drop that side chain.
Walter Gehring's work on the regulatory genes
controlling the development of the insect eye reflects
this conception. The relevant genes may well function
this way, but the story on this level is surely
incomplete, and Darwinian theory is not apt to fill in
the pieces.
That we don't understand all there is to know about genetics is a
mindless truism. So what? Darwinists never *claimed* to. Darwin
himself did not even know about genetics. The issues described
above have very little to do with Darwinian evolution; they are
issues of the details of *genetics*. The complexity of genetic
function is well known, but irrelevant to whether naturalistic
Darwinian branching-by-replication-with-variation evolution is
basically true or not. It is not *up* to "Darwinian theory . . . to fill in
the pieces."
I personally expect that we will find many *more* of the types of
things we would expect to find in such a "computer program
encoding" system evolved by natural processes. We will find other
things like telomeres, multi-level control mechanisms, multi-way
conditional branching, and so on, as we *do* unravel the details of
both genetics and the reproductive process at both the organism and
the cellular reproduction levels (not to mention gene-expression
within the cell and the organism).
But that this is generally complex is hardly relevant to Darwinism
because it is not, primarily a function of Darwinism to explain how
such things work. It may be the function of evolutionary theory to
seek and find explanations as to how these complexities *arose*,
but it is hardly a defect in the *theory* that empirical research has
not yet determined the specifics of such facts, particularly since the
facts themselves are not well understood yet. Schutzenberger is
playing the game of pretending that empirical ignorance is a
*theoretical* defect. We don't know why, ultimately, matter exists,
but does that invalidate the theories that describe how matter
behaves?
His remark about formal logic not shedding light on how living
things are organized so as to allow evolution is in the same
irrelevant vein, particularly since formal logic is not a part of the
theory he is criticizing. The question is *related* to evolutionary
theory, but not a reflection on it. Of *course* living things have to
be organized along certain lines or they can't evolve. So what?
Perhaps he should have considered taking up robotics, cybernetics,
genetic programming, and machine perception, fields much more
closely related to biology than is mathematics. We *know* what it
takes to make a robot (though not in detail what it takes to make a
really *good* robot, sadly). We know it needs energy and some sort
of control mechanism that enables it to use that energy. We know it
needs informational input and some means of acting in the world
and internally. *This* is the "specific" type of organization that
naturally-occurring life has. This is not one of the mysteries of life.
The *mysteries* (so far) are the specifics of how these functions are
achieved in the real world. And, again, this is not really relevant to
whether Darwinism is true or not, whether Darwinism entails
"miracles" or not.
[end of "Schutzenberger's Folly, part 2]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Sep 23 2000 - 02:15:58 EDT