Re: [metatuning] Digest Number 614

Hi Carl,

> > I wonder if anyone has thought about studying evolution of
> > ecosystems.
>
> In fact they have. Stuart Kauffman and his colleagues at the
> Sante Fe Institute started work on this in the 80's, and
> Kauffman's tome on the topic is now a standard in this growing
> field. I don't know if the particular scenarios you describe
> have been modeled, but one of the central questions of the
> field is, 'do ecosystems tend to get more complex with time,
> and if so, why, and what does it mean?'. One of the most
> fundamental results in the field are the so called "No Free
> Lunch" theorems, which state that for an agent trying to move
> to the highest point on a fitness landscape but with only a
> local view of it, no single search algorithm outperforms a
> random walk, on average over all possible landscapes.
>

Thanks! I expect it is like maths where popular thinking on the
subject often lags about fifty years or sometimes a century or more
behind the research :-).

I'd like to read that book, and will take a look in the libraries
here.

Another thought I've had, which they must surely address too:
when they talk about selection for survival traits, sometimes
one gets the impression that they are independent, as if an
animal can just evolve some trait without affecting other
things. But they must be interconnected too. Maybe that is
why there is so much in the way of convergent evolution.
If you want to swim fast, you have to end up with a streamlined
shape. If you want to fly, it seems that two wings is probably
the best solution unless you are small enough to be a butterfly
or dragonfly or beetle.

Maybe if you want to be an intelligent being, then you have
to be capable of sympathy, because you are bound to look around
and see other intelligent beings, animals too, and to realise
they have feelings too.

So maybe even if there were selection pressure against that
at some point, maybe nothing can be done about it and it is
a given, liek the streamlined shape of an aquatic creature
or the wings of a bird. Maybe having two wings in thta shape
has some disadvantages on occasion in terms of selection pressure,
maybe having a streamlined skin has some too, but there isn't much
to be done about those if you want to fly or swim efficiently.
So same thing if you want to be intelligent.

Instead, probably evolution has to work with sympathy and
to make it into something that helps the species to survive
rather than a disadvantage.

Robert