Text 448, 65 rader
Skriven 2004-10-21 09:48:00 av Guy Hoelzer (1:278/230)
Ärende: Re: the why question
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in article cl65ss$b41$1@darwin.ediacara.org, Tim Tyler at tim@tt1lock.org
wrote on 10/20/04 10:05 AM:

>> in article cks1r6$feq$1@darwin.ediacara.org, Tim Tyler at tim@tt1lock.org
> 
>>> If a biologically-based entropic maximand is proposed, I therefore
>>> think that it can't simply stress short term measurements of entropy
>>> increase - instead, it must consider long-term effects.

[snip]

>>> This is directly analogous to the situation with maximising genetic
>>> descendants:
>>> 
>>> Genes should be expected to maximise the number of their long-term
>>> descendants - rather than the number of their immediate offspring.
>> 
>> And this is something that, IMHO, they do.  Do you agree? [...]
> 
> Yes.
> 
> Caveat 1: they might find local (not global) maxima;
> 
> Caveat 2: they might fail to ascend these maxima - due to mutation load;
> 
> Note 1: maximising the number of long-term descendants is often rather
> a lot like maximising the number of their immediate offspring - especially
> in one common case - where there's no parental care.

I would like to subtly back away from my comment above and suggest a
somewhat different perspective.  It is natural selection that is expected to
maximize the fitness (reproductive rate) of genes or organisms, not the
individuals themselves.  Individual genes and organisms are free to do
otherwise, and they often do.  It is natural selection that integrates long
term effects relative to the lifespans of individual organisms and genes.
Replacing individual instantiations with the process of natural selection, I
agree that NS can lead populations to merely local fitness maxima, and that
it can even fail to do that for a variety of reasons.  This is all a bit of
an aside to the question of temporal extension of process, in general.
Clearly, NS is a process that reaches over long time spans relative to our
generation time.  I think you implied that thermodynamics does not do this,
so that this was a feature that distinguishes NS from thermodynamics.  I
disagree.  Thermodynamics underpins all sorts of processes, every one of
which is extended through time to some degree.  We are used to thinking of
thermodynamic processes acting over short time scales, but I know of no
theoretical limitation to the temporal extent of thermodynamic processes.
My view is that the origin of reproduction provided a mechanism for a
thermodynamic process to manifest that has a long temporal reach, and that
natural selection is the name we have given to this process.  In other
words, this view stresses increasing the rate of entropy production over a
relatively long term, while insisting that everything that happens along the
way increases the rate of entropy production, too.

Cheers,

Guy
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