Re: OOL X - The origin of the RNA world.

Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t <rem642b@xxxxxxxxx> wrote or quoted:

> > From: Tim Tyler <tim@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Lovelock made no such mistake. His theis was that the planet acted
> > on a global scale as a self-regulating homeostatic system.
>
> Regardless of whether he used the word "organism" or merely used a
> phrase which is its definition, he said the same thing, which was wrong
> IMO. [...]

Got a quote from Lovelock making the supposed mistake you mention?


> Unless you use the "weak anthropic" principle applied to the
> parallel-universe interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the Earth's
> biosystem was not competing with other similar systems for survival, so
> there's no way that natural selection could have evolved our particular
> biosystem to be a self-regulating homeostatic system.

That's not the theory. The theory does not suggest the system arose
through competition with others like it. It suggests that feedback
mechanisms are generated by living organisms that tend to maintain
a homeostatic state. Lovelock's most famous example of this happeneing
is his "daisy world" model. There organisms acting locally and selfishly
produce a global system that acts against externally imposed temperature
changes. It's not natural selection that produces the effect he is
talking about - it's another sort of self-organising principle.

> The oxygen disaster is a counterexample to his claim. It now appears
> the end-Permian extinction event was likewise a counterexample.
>
> Fortunately the oxygen disaster occurred gradually over a long time,
> and was self-regulating, so there was time for natural selection to
> increase the number of lifeforms slightly tolerent, then substantialy
> tolerant, then very much tolerant. But nevertheless the response of the
> ecosystem was to just keep making conditions worse and worse for the
> life which was around until that time, as bad as it could possibly get,
> rather than to take measures to reduce the damage. That kind of change
> is nothing like a self-regulating homeostatic system.

Lovelock explicitly predicts such disasters. Make his daisy world
*too* hot and the homeostatic system fails - the system oscillates
for a while - and then a new equilibrium establishes itself.

The theory goes that the periods of instability are uncommon - and
that most time is spent in a state of stasis - so the chances of
observing stasis are high.

> Right now Humans are setting off a brand-new end-Permian type of
> extinction event, and "gaia" isn't stopping us, AIDS and West-Nile
> virus and hemorragic fever notwithstanding. It would be extremely
> foolish of us to just take for granted that "gaia" will self-regulate
> the harm we're doing to the environment and stop the destruction of
> habitat before a fatal ecosystem collapse happens. But that's just what
> a belief in "gaia" would lead somebody to assume, that we don't have to
> worry, "gaia" will save the environment.

Gaia theory is popular among environmentalists in part because it
predicts the opposite of what you say. It doesn't suggest the
homeostasis resists all kinds of perturbations. It suggests that
a sufficiently large knock will shift the system into a new
equilibrium. Environmentalists love to suggest that if we
keep messing with the environment, it will keep shifting
gear - and we might not like the new environments it presents
us with.

> > Your criticsim of Lovelock's ideas is the same as Dawkins' criticism
> > of them - but you are both taking the original idea far to literally.
>
> Please post link to and/or summary of Dawkins' comment on this topic so
> I can see for myself if he's making any mistake.

I /think/ it was in the Blind Watchmaker.

He didn't like the idea of the planet as an organism.

``The model was designed to answer criticisms of the Gaia theory made by
W. Ford Doolittle and Richard Dawkins, both of whom are also
represented in this volume. They argued that Lovelock's hypothesis that
the Earth's climate was regulated "by and for the biota" was
teleological, implying impossible foresight and planning on the part of
the biota.''

- http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/srb/biologies.html

> > In a nutshell, the idea is that - in the far future - living
> > organisms may coordinate their cooperative activity on a universal
> > scale. They might dispense with their endosymbionts, symbionts and
> > parasites - and come together to form a single large organism - the
> > last living thing.
>
> I don't think that will be possible.

It may not be - but nobody really knows.

> Once our descendents start to build a Dyson sphere and use some of that
> immense energy utility to send our seed to other stars and build Dyson
> spheres there too etc. starhopping and eventually galaxyhopping, until
> our descendents have colonized the entire Virgo supercluster, the tens
> of millions of lightyears between the different parts of colonized
> space will offer only two options: (1) Give up the idea of the whole
> thing being one coordinated organism, or (2) slow down live to where
> each decision takes tens of millions of years instead of just a 20th of
> a second (or a picosecond as with computers nowadays). There's no way
> we can slow down and remain competitive with lifeforms that breed
> quickly, so I consider option (2) unlikely.

We don't know what the laws of physics are yet. Long term cosmological
predictions based on the absence of wormholes, extra dimensions,
escape by life from the visible universe into entirely new realms
must be labelled as highly uncertain.

Distance seems like a significant barrier today - but maybe our
descendants will overcome it.

> > Reciprocal altruism and kin selection are responsible for most
> > cooperation in nature. Group selection appears to be of low relevance.
>
> Within an individual cell, group selection is all there is.

....

> The individual parts of a cell are not capable of engaging in reciprocal
> altruism with each other.

....

> Also within a single cell, all parts are equally related to each other,
> so it's not possible to cooperate with kin at the expense of non-kin,
> except when invading disease is recognized.

....or when you have a polyploid genome ;-)

> Also, the various parts of the genome aren't kin to each other at all
> at the molecular level, except in the rare case of a very recently
> duplicated segment of genome. So there's no way section 436872
> of the genome would cooperate with section 643872 of the genome because
> of them being closer relatives than other parts of the cell. The reason
> why section 436872 and section 643872 cooperate with each other is
> because their ancestors who cooperated survived by group selection
> better than their ancestors' brothers who didn't, so they were produced
> whereas their cousins weren't.

I /think/ you are calling this "group selection" because you are regarding
the genes as a sort of group.

You may find the term "gene group selection" useful - this sort of
group selection is pretty different from the conventional sort.

However, I take your point - this sort of selection *does* produce
cooperation - and is neither kin selection or reciprocal altruism.

> (Regarding your hypothetical single organism that never replicated.)
> > > There's no natural-selection mechanism to cause any such mechanism to
> > > ever evolve in the first place (unless it is that last surviving member
> > > of a species that reproduced in the past).
> > No natural selection - but the topic was *evolution* - and
> > evolution != natural selection.
>
> Natural selection is the only known principle for evolving more and
> more fit genomes, whether "more fit" means more cooperation among
> selves to accomplish tasks possible only through cooperation, or better
> defense against enemies, etc. If not natural selection, please tell
> what mechanism of evolution could ever produce cooperation.

The hypothetical organism under discussion would *originally* the
product of natural selection. It would be our final descentant.

> > Such an organism would be subject to self-directed evolution.
>
> If it *already* had somehow obtained sufficient internal cooperation to
> achieve intelligent thought, then maybe could study science and nature
> and learn its options and pick a course such as you suggest. [...]

That's the idea.

> But short of a supernatural being or a scientist space alien
> constructing such an organism, or that organism evolving by natural
> selection, there's no way such an organism could ever come into being.

The organism's ancestors would have evolved via natural selection.

> > Rather than evolve under natural selection, it would become what
> > it wanted to become.
>
> Same answer as previous answer: Without natural selection previously,
> there's no way such an organism could reach that level of sofistication
> to where it could "want" anything. [...]

An evolutionary process involving natural selection would have been
responsible for how the organism in question originally came to exist.
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to reply.

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