Category: Evolution
The adaptive landscape of science
Biology and Philosophy
This is a paper returning to my roots - the evolutionary view of scientific theory change. My first paper, back in the Jurassic, was a rough and ready attempt to make sense of David Hull's view of science as a semantic conception of theories. In the light of problems such as suboptimality in evolution, many people decided that science could not be just an evolutionary (in the sense of selectionist) process because science did not require the sort of random wanderings in order to reach more optimal solutions that species, gene pools and artificial intelligence systems needed, and was always progressive. In the light of recent work by Sergey Gavrilets, however, the need for the "descent into the adaptive valley" became otiose. Gavrilets showed that for genomes (problem spaces) of sufficiently high dimensionality, there was almost always a "nearly neutral corridor" of high fitness between one solution and another. So I argue that in the light of Gavrilets' work, we no longer need to oppose selection and drift, in science or in biology (see my earlier paper on speciation).
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:28 PM • 3 Comments
Category: Biodiversity
I get a lot of Google alerts about various things, including species concepts, obviously. I have noticed a pattern: media from the so-called "developed" or "first world" almost never put much in the way of actual facts or knowledge in their reports, concerned, I guess, that it will scare the consumers away. But the developing nations, in this case Bangladesh, will do so. They seem to value knowledge and science. Wonder why?
Here's a piece "The Importance of biodiversity", from The New Nation, a Bangladeshi independent newspaper:
Wetland ecosystems (swamps, marshes, etc.) absorb and recycle essential nutrients, treat sewage, and cleanse wastes. In estuaries, molluscs remove nutrients from the water, helping to prevent nutrient over-enrichment and its attendant problems, such as eutrophication arising from fertilizer run-off. Trees and forest soils purify water as it flows through forest ecosystems. In preventing soils from being washed away, forests also prevent the harmful siltation of rivers and reservoirs that may arise from erosion and landslides.
Around 99 per cent of potential crop pests are controlled by a variety of other organisms, including insects, birds and fungi. These natural pesticides are in many ways superior to their artificial equivalents, since pests can often develop resistance to chemical controls.
Some 130 billion metric tons of organic waste is processed every year by earth's decomposing organisms. Many industrial wastes, including detergents, oils, acids and paper, are also detoxified and decomposed by the activities of living things. In soils, the end product of these processes - a range of simple inorganic chemicals - is returned to plants as nutrients. Higher (vascular) plants can themselves serve to remove harmful substances from groundwater.
Many flowering plants rely on the activities of various animal species - bees, butterflies, bats, birds, etc. - to help them reproduce through the transportation of pollen. More than one-third of humanity's food crops depend on this process of natural pollination. Many animal species have evolved to perform an additional function in plant reproduction through the dispersal of seeds.
No pandering to religious objections, no watering down for political reasons, just facts, and salient and important facts at that.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:08 AM • 8 Comments
Category: Evolution
Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side effect of divergent selection. So here they are below the fold with abstracts and my comments...
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:41 AM • 2 Comments
Category: History
My Sciblings Bora, John, Brian and Benjamin have asked what the value of the history of science is to scientists. Below the fold is my apologia for writing a stonking great history of a scientific concept (species, in case the sidebar wasn't enough hint), in which I defend the worth of intellectual history to historians. Maybe it will add something to this debate. It is from the preface to my book. I hope the history of science is worthwhile, but it is interesting that the people who most wanted my book to be published are scientists working in the field on which I am writing, so I think it has value in their eyes.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:35 PM • 9 Comments
Category: General Science
Phil, of Bad Astronomy fame, has been offered and accepted the chairmanship of James Randi's Educational Foundation. I think that's a great choice by Randi and a great honour for Phil. Couldn't happen to a better guy.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:41 AM • 0 Comments
Category: Humor
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:26 AM • 4 Comments
Category: Administrative
A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks like he knows whereof he speaks... Thanks to Eduardo Zugasti for the choice and translation.
Second, and more important, is a paper in Nature by Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse. Entitled "Life, Logic and Information" it is yet another claim that information technology is the best way to conceptualise biology, in particular biological systems. I am fully in agreement with Bitesize Bio's comment:
The lac operon, for instance, isn’t really an electronic switch. Skipping over the biochemical interaction coefficients is fatal to one’s understanding if he or she uses the lac operon model to explain gene and protein regulation in the Eukaryotic cell.
Systems biology is all very well, but it seems to me there is a fundamental flaw in treating living systems as logical systems. As Inigo Montoya would have said, "You keep using that logical operator. I do not think it means what you think it means."
There has always been a tendency for scientists and philosophers to appeal to the latest and best technology to explain living things. That is where mechanism came from, via clockwork and pulleys and levers in Descartes, to a "mill" in Leibniz, to explanations of the nervous system as a telegraphic, telephonic and eventually cybernetic machine. And these ideas are nothing more than empty similes, unless they are grounded directly in an understanding of the organisms themselves. For example, "natural selection" is not a simile but a way to express what is going on in evolution (some of the time) in metaphorical language. But "the brain or the cell is a computer" is pure metaphor.
Such claims are also often accompanied with the claim that reductionism is dead or unfruitful in biology. I see no reason to think this is true. But the sort of reductionism I would promote is that which includes the systemic relations between parts (indeed, only the very simplest and braindead reductionism would ignore those relations), so systems thinking is necessary in biology. It would be hard to find anyone who said differently.
So Systems Biology tends to resolve to claims like Nurse's that we need to conceptualise biological systems as abstract information processing systems, and the current "best technologies" are of course cybernetic control systems and computers. But while a very good case can be made for some aspects of biology being like a cybernetic control system (especially homeostatic mechanisms), it seems to me that the computer analogy hides more than it reveals about life. At best, nervous systems are computer-like (although they are much more communication-like I think); the rest of biology - including cell signalling and activation cascades - are really not. And genes, as I have previously argued, are not much at all...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:39 AM • 4 Comments
Category: Social evolution
Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other societies, such as those constituted by bees and ants, have also arisen out of the advantage of cooperation in the struggle for existence; and their resemblances to, and their differences from, human society are alike instructive. [T . H. Huxley, Prolegomena to Evolution and Ethics, IX.]
Just because John Lynch mentioned that work...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:51 AM • 2 Comments
