Evoluiton can't account for higher-level animal behaviour

[GrowingSmaller]

I believe that consciousness' role in adaptation is missed. Its quite obvious if you think about it. It makes things matter.*

It gives the organism a lived experience with value as an intrinsic element. Like, hunger is bad, pain is bad, broken bones are bad etc. That fruit looks good etc. Therefore the conscious animal possesses a basic rationality in that it has interests and chooses what is in those interests. Or, however clumsily, it at least tries to.

Rationality because, it is rational to choose what is better, and consciousness allows for 'better' and 'worse' courses of action. Or, states of being.

I call this 'rational attraction to being'. Its the 'form' (modality, way, procedure, goal and mechanism) of conscious life.

Purely physical (or non-mental) evolution is 'irrational attraction to being' because it produces life forms which survive and continue to exist, but without good reason to do so. There are causes or reasons in the process, but they are non-mental. Its just machinery. And therefore has no moral or qualitative element. Elementary Darwinism.

Imagine the difference. A smile that is just down to muscle machinery, and a smile that is due to consciousness.

Consciousness gives us a good reason to survive. A good reason to eat. A good reason not to fall over etc. Consciousness, then, is basically the foundation of ethics. Including the concept that "higher animals" deserve some kind of consideration and respect.

*its worth noting that (IIRC) the mammalian (basic needs, urges) and emotional brain (feelings) are said to have developed before the higher order frontal lobe processing ( advance planning, moral reasoning etc). The former "axiological / value containing" functions were the foundation of the latter. They give us a a rationale to plan etc.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

If the brain were not influenced by consciousness, in its production of speech acts etc., then we may as well be classed as p-zombies chatting about consciousness but not having it.

If consciousness is, as the evidence suggests, a mode of operation of the brain, i.e. brain processes, then the interaction problem goes away - consciousness doesn't need to 'influence' the brain because it is the brain in action.

The p-zombie concept seems incoherent to me - if the whole world was populated by p-zombies, nothing would be different. To behave exactly as if it was conscious in all situations, it would need to emulate conscious experience exactly. Consider a b-zombie that had no heart, but had blood circulation and a pulse, would bleed when cut, could blush, go pale, give and receive transfusions, and could suffer all the symptoms of heart attacks and cardiac arrests. It would need something to pump the blood around its body that was so like a heart that it would be indistinguishable from a heart.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Even the concept of a random event is somewhat debatable and I seriously doubt that a random event could occur.

Whether the evolution of one species to another has actually occurred in the past and as a result of some random processes. Seems to be a stretch of someone's imagination, rather than an observable phenomenon in the fossil record.

No one can prove that random events even occur.

This is a bit of a red herring equivocation of 'random'. It's only necessary that events are unpredictable in the relevant context. At the molecular level, this means things like thermal noise, Brownian motion, photons of light, vibrations, pressure changes, and so-on. At macro scales, it can be anything from insect bites and infections to extreme weather, volcanoes, and asteroid strikes.

If one was to examine the fossil record all that is really visible is sudden death and extinction events. Sure new species appear but they appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil layers. It is the absence of the many required transitional forms of any species, that is the absence of evidence in the fossil record.

What we see is exactly what we'd expect from irregular snapshots of the conventional evolutionary process. There are general patterns of sequential change even where individual lineages can't be traced.

 

[Bungle_Bear]

If one was to examine the fossil record all that is really visible is sudden death and extinction events. Sure new species appear but they appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil layers. It is the absence of the many required transitional forms of any species, that is the absence of evidence in the fossil record.

I love this assertion. How do you know the fossil you dig up is not an example of the very transitional form you claim we don't have? What would such a transitional specimen look like?

 

[NBB]

So, humans have created a lot of things with effort intelligence, creativity, but none of them come close to a conscious intelligent being, now how exactly evolution did better than man? without even trying? without any intelligence and design and creativity at all?

 

[durangodawood]

....now how exactly evolution did better than man?....

Hey give man a break! We've only been at it for a few millennia. Give us another hundred years and we'll have made the AI's that replace us.

 

[expos4ever]

You asked for a citation.

How about we just talk about the consequences of over eating.

How about you defend your claim?

Yes, lifestyle factors are big, but I believe you are guessing when you claim that most doctor visits for people in their 50's and 60's are due to lifestyle choices they make.

But I have to add my voice to pita's in calling you out on extremely irresponsible behaviour on your part:

So when I walk past a doctor's practice I always warn older people not to see the doctor.

If you are really doing this, you are endangering the lives of vulnerable people.

 

[pitabread]

These numbers are inadequate. But four out of 6x10^12 doesn't sound very promising for evolution. And those were only very short 80 aa proteins.

Keep in mind they were looking for proteins that specifically bind ATP, not necessarily functional proteins in general.

Would 4 billion years be long enough to find 400 aa proteins? 600 aa proteins? Would trillions of years be adequate?

The other thing to keep in mind is that organisms don't have to invent proteins completely from scratch every single time. The process of evolution is a recursive process that continually builds and modifies what came previously.

Evolution? When I use that word, I'm referring to microbe-to-man evolution. I've observed many evolutionists are only thinking about new species when they use it.

No, it's much more than that. The study of phylogenetics (evolutionary relationships) has a variety of applications. Most notably in its applications to genomics (e.g. comparative genomics) you're talking about things well above the species level.

They also have the erroneous notion that lots of little mutations accumulate to form the complex, hierarchical, interdependent systems observed in life.

The study of how evolution can produce complex structures isn't new or unknown to biologists.

There is lots of literature on the subject.

Michael Behe reveals his research in his most recent book, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution, that shows evolution produces new species and even new genera as advertised, but never new families, orders or higher taxa. This is because essentially all mutations are damaging. But some damaging mutations are beneficial and are positively selected. But damage can't design new structures, molecular machines or organs.

I haven't read that book, so I cannot comment. One thing to point out though is that all those taxanomic levels are just artificial human constructs. The only true reality in biology is gene flow between populations of organisms. Drawing artificial lines re: evolution based on artificial taxonomy is just silly.

Also, all mutations are not 'damaging'. The vast majority of mutations are neutral. You probably have about ~50 or more novel mutations alone.

So I suspect that the "evolution" you refer to as solving problems is micro-evolution which produces new species and genera. No conflict. No argument.

No, I'm talking about applications (e.g. comparative genomics) that involve understanding and applications of evolutionary relationships well above the species or genus levels.

But my argument stands that the enormity of the universe of protein permutations shows that new proteins couldn't have evolved in merely trillions of years. Your number of 5x10^30 current bacterial organisms on Earth is very interesting, though trivially tiny compared to that universe.

All you've done is repeatedly assert something. Your only citation on that topic was the infamous Axe paper which doesn't support your claim.

And I just gave you an example which shows otherwise.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

So, humans have created a lot of things with effort intelligence, creativity, but none of them come close to a conscious intelligent being, now how exactly evolution did better than man? without even trying? without any intelligence and design and creativity at all?

3 billion years of incredibly inefficient trial-and-error with quintillions of organisms over a whole planet.

 

[loveofourlord]

Keep in mind they were looking for proteins that specifically bind ATP, not necessarily functional proteins in general.



The other thing to keep in mind is that organisms don't have to invent proteins completely from scratch every single time. The process of evolution is a recursive process that continually builds and modifies what came previously.



No, it's much more than that. The study of phylogenetics (evolutionary relationships) has a variety of applications. Most notably in its applications to genomics (e.g. comparative genomics) you're talking about things well above the species level.



The study of how evolution can produce complex structures isn't new or unknown to biologists.

There is lots of literature on the subject.



I haven't read that book, so I cannot comment. One thing to point out though is that all those taxanomic levels are just artificial human constructs. The only true reality in biology is gene flow between populations of organisms. Drawing artificial lines re: evolution based on artificial taxonomy is just silly.

Also, all mutations are not 'damaging'. The vast majority of mutations are neutral. You probably have about ~50 or more novel mutations alone.



No, I'm talking about applications (e.g. comparative genomics) that involve understanding and applications of evolutionary relationships well above the species or genus levels.



All you've done is repeatedly assert something. Your only citation on that topic was the infamous Axe paper which doesn't support your claim.

And I just gave you an example which shows otherwise.

Even if 99% of mutations were harmful, thats where natural selection and misscariages weed out, if there is a fatal mutation majority of the time it won't form long enough to be born.

 

[KenJackson]

Even if 99% of mutations were harmful, thats where natural selection and misscariages weed out, if there is a fatal mutation majority of the time it won't form long enough to be born.

Natural selection selects organisms with features that give it a benefit for survival, but that can't happen on the long path to a new protein. It would have to pass through many states that don't have any benefit. There's no "selection pressure" when there's no benefit.

Natural selection can't help evolve new proteins. (Note that little tweaks of a couple amino acids might be called "new", but it's not a new protein.)

 

[loveofourlord]

Natural selection selects organisms with features that give it a benefit for survival, but that can't happen on the long path to a new protein. It would have to pass through many states that don't have any benefit. There's no "selection pressure" when there's no benefit.

Natural selection can't help evolve new proteins. (Note that little tweaks of a couple amino acids might be called "new", but it's not a new protein.)

So....you think if there is no pressure to for benefit they just disapear? Of course not the mutation still stays in the genome, so it make take a thousand or a million years for it to become beneficial, but during that time it's still hanging around in the DNA as random mutations mutate. Many of your DNA is future beneficial mutations waiting to happen. Also each thing doesn't have only 1 path to usefulness, just because it took one path to be useful this time, doesn't mean there were not 100 different ways it could have gone that lead to better or worse mutations compared to the one taken.

Also here is another issue, you pressume that the current mutation with say 14 was the only beneficial mutation, that ignores that there might have been many along the way, and that were just seeing what is the best version of it. Mutation 3 could have been beneficial, then mutation 6 was better and so on, there is no reason to pressume that because the current one is 14 mutations away from original that it was 14 to get a beneficial.

 

[pitabread]

Can be, but is it a hand wave or proper science? I get the idea, of emergence, but am not sue how top-down (consciousness to matter) causation would work. Wouldn't it undermine the bottom-up events that lead to the emeregence in the first place?

I've seen it discussed directly in scientific literature. It's also a fundamental part of complexity theory.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on emergent properties having only a passing familiarity with the concept. I thought it would provide a point-of-interest for further reading given the thread topic.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Can be, but is it a hand wave or proper science? I get the idea, of emergence, but am not sue how top-down (consciousness to matter) causation would work. Wouldn't it undermine the bottom-up events that lead to the emeregence in the first place?

Top-down and bottom-up causation are just two ways of looking at the same thing. Emergent behaviour comes from the interactions of many, often similar, elements, which produce patterns of activity that are not predictable from a knowledge of the individual elements alone - often because the patterns of activity will vary according to the way the elements are initially arranged (e.g. Conway's Game of Life), or due to external influences (e.g. bird flocks, fish shoals). Typically, you can only predict the activity by running a simulation to see what happens.

The patterns produced follow their own emergent behavioural rules (dictated by the large-scale effects of all the individual element interactions), so their behaviours can be predictable as emergent entities in their own right (e.g. Conway's Game of Life). Cellular automata like CGoL are particularly clear and simple examples of emergent behaviour because their elements are static grid cells, their possible states are typically binary (on/off), and their rules are very simple (turn on or off according to the state of your immediate neighbours). If you set up the initial state of CGoL right, you can make the patterns emulate CGoL itself, or work as a programmable computer, or even replicate themsleves.

When these emergent patterns interact with themselves or the environment, it's still the elements they're composed of that are interacting at the micro-level, but it's far easier to follow what's going on if you treat the patterns themselves as causative entities following their own rules at the macro-level, rather than figure out how their individual elements all work together to produce the pattern interactions.

Once you have a handle on how this kind of emergence works, it's worth considering whether the neurons in the brain might be acting partly like a very complex cellular automation, where it's the patterns of neural activity that are the emergent computational and causal entities...

 

[Skreeper]

Climate change alarmist hypocrites have cried wolf too many times over too many decades to be taken seriously by anyone over 16 years old.

The majority of people do take it seriously, it's mostly the older generations who somehow seem to have a problem with our intend to keep the planet from being uninhabitable by humans.

That's one of the many reasons that the resentment towards boomers is growing. You guys wrecked the planet and now are too old to care about fixing the mistakes you made since you won't be around to experience the consequences.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

If consciousness is, as the evidence suggests, a mode of operation of the brain, i.e. brain processes, then the interaction problem goes away - consciousness doesn't need to 'influence' the brain because it is the brain in action.

I'm a dualist. I think there is explanatory dualism, in that we explain actions that result from consciousness in a different way than we do purely 'mechanical' processes. I'm influences by Wilhelm Dilthey here:

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the natural sciences in that the former depend on the understanding of meaningful human actions, while the latter depend on causal explanation of physical events. source
Understanding Society: Dilthey on the human sciences

Whether this "explanatory dualism" entails a substance dualism I don't know. I suppose that the conscious mind could still be a physical thing, even thought physics is the wrong discipline to talk about it. But, not 100% on that one.

Isn't a physical thing, something describable by physics?

It would need something to pump the blood around its body that was so like a heart that it would be indistinguishable from a heart.

great example!

 

[GrowingSmaller]

I've seen it discussed directly in scientific literature. It's also a fundamental part of complexity theory.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on emergent properties having only a passing familiarity with the concept. I thought it would provide a point-of-interest for further reading given the thread topic.

Thanks. One issue I have thought of is, emergent systems (like flocking behaviour in birds) aren't necessarily conscious. No one thinks that a flock produces a super-mind, afaik.

So, the human mind could be emergent, but in itself the general idea of emergence can't be the solution. Simply because not all emergent phenomena are conscious, so its not sufficient explanation.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Top-down and bottom-up causation are just two ways of looking at the same thing. Emergent behaviour comes from the interactions of many, often similar, elements, which produce patterns of activity that are not predictable from a knowledge of the individual elements alone - often because the patterns of activity will vary according to the way the elements are initially arranged (e.g. Conway's Game of Life), or due to external influences (e.g. bird flocks, fish shoals). Typically, you can only predict the activity by running a simulation to see what happens.

The patterns produced follow their own emergent behavioural rules (dictated by the large-scale effects of all the individual element interactions), so their behaviours can be predictable as emergent entities in their own right (e.g. Conway's Game of Life). Cellular automata like CGoL are particularly clear and simple examples of emergent behaviour because their elements are static grid cells, their possible states are typically binary (on/off), and their rules are very simple (turn on or off according to the state of your immediate neighbours). If you set up the initial state of CGoL right, you can make the patterns emulate CGoL itself, or work as a programmable computer, or even replicate themsleves.

When these emergent patterns interact with themselves or the environment, it's still the elements they're composed of that are interacting at the micro-level, but it's far easier to follow what's going on if you treat the patterns themselves as causative entities following their own rules at the macro-level, rather than figure out how their individual elements all work together to produce the pattern interactions.

Once you have a handle on how this kind of emergence works, it's worth considering whether the neurons in the brain might be acting partly like a very complex cellular automation, where it's the patterns of neural activity that are the emergent computational and causal entities...

Nice post thanks! AFAIK emergent systems have a "novel statistical signature". Meaning I think, that the top level behavious of the flock for instance becomes the best, easiest way to to talk about all those birds.

Still I'm having issues though, because mind is an new ontological property, and in all other cases of emergence, the behaviour is merely on the physical plane.

 

[loveofourlord]

Thanks. One issue I have thought of is, emergent systems (like flocking behaviour in birds) aren't necessarily conscious. No one thinks that a flock produces a super-mind, afaik.

So, the human mind could be emergent, but in itself the general idea of emergence can't be the solution. Simply because not all emergent phenomena are conscious, so its not sufficient explanation.

or it could just be a more complex version, there are some studies that seem to show that at least some of what we do is ad hoc vs actually planned.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

But back to evolution, if there is "explanatory dualism" (between the human sciences and the physical sciences, see my post #96) and evolution is a physicalist theory, then there are some things it cant explain.