Re: Minimization principal for evolution



"g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

My main point is that you can have a single universal objective
function, as long as you make it a function of both an internal
(endogenous) state space and an external (exogenous) parameter
space. In fact, such viewpoints are not restricted to biology.
Similar thinking appears in algorithmic approaches to optimization -
for example in the idea of simulated annealing.

PiP,
As ALWAYS, I enjoy your views. I think you and I agree that there is -
-
within reach of mathematics concepts -- a statistical model for
handling
anything and everything..

JE:-
Except of course STATISTICS itself (as Godel would have explained).
John,

I really enjoy watching your arguments sometimes, but do not engage with
you
in them very often or for very long for the simple reason that to do so
requires a greater investment in energy directed at "a communications
game,"
as it were, than I am willing to abandon other interests and pursuits to
focus upon and work at, so long as you seek to steer monolaterally. This
is
by no means a criticism of you. In fact you impress me that you probably
have an IQ in the upper nosebleed range; and that both fascinates me and
frustrates me -- not because I could not answer your steering questions
and
play the game on your terms, but because doing so would require more
energy
and time than I am willing to divert away from my own where-I-am's and
where-I'm-motivated-to-go's du jour.

JE:-
Gil,
The last time I was tested for IQ (at the beginning of secondary school) I
had a score of just 95 so I was shunted off to complete non academic
(tradesmen) studies. Most of what I remember of that IQ test consisted of
really silly hypothetical questions designed to test culturally bound
_deductive_ (not inductive), skills. To this day I have nothing but contempt
for the gross misuse of IQ tests within the education system both in the
past and to this very day. As I have previously argued, IQ has never been
_standardized_ so the common use of it remains absurd. I know quite a few
people with a mensa type IQ. None of them appear to have what I would term
good inductive skills. What I call intelligence is based on the (inductive)
ability to be able to separate the few salient facts from the veritable
mountains of non salient facts that a large number of entirely unconnected
specialists produce in order to facilitate valid theories of nature. This
generalist skill requires maintaining a 100% self consistent arguments, i.e.
absolutely no contradictions are ever allowed including the (common) use of
absolute self contradictions because they always end up producing Epimenides
paradox. Today's orgy of ambiguity is just a Post Modern cop out by
specialists who cannot think inductively with any rigor.



And I sense that some of the very
brightest posters to sbe actually admire your skills at steering and
"gaming" an exchange of ideas as much as I do but, like me, do not want to
abandon other thoughts and pursuits to engage yours exclusively.

JE:-
Science is a very strict methodology requiring testable theories of nature
that _can_ be judged by nature itself, i.e. nature is and remains the only
valid authority that science can have. My intention is always to steer
discussion to remain within this methodology because almost all the time,
people wish to steer discussion outside of it. This appears to be because
working within the methodology is too hard and/or too dangerous re: the
preservation of status and power within a monopolistic system (government
funded science).



That friendly and sincerely complimentary disclosure having been made, I
would like to share some thoughts with you from time to time precisely
BECAUSE you are so clever, without bogging down in philosophical vortexing
toward the ultimately inevitable paradoxes and dilemmas which CAN BE
spun
off from any line of reasoning -- vis a vis my former disclosure that my
view of philosophy is that it expands one's thinking healthily and
productively by being an open-ended study, but has the OPPOSITE effect
upon
the intellect if one goes down a single philosophical school of thought
cul
de sac, and gets STUCK there, as many sophomoric thinkers do.

JE:-
Our sad history is littered with injustice produced by irrefutable claims.
The epistemology of science, without exception, does not allow irrefutable
claims as to what reality is supposed to be (valid theories of science)
where this includes common irrefutable simplified/oversimplified models of
entirely refutable theories, misused to replace the theory they were
simplified/oversimplified from e.g. Hamilton's Rule (a detailed example that
I present here). That is all. Please explain to readers as to why you argue
that irrefutable statements about what nature is should be allowed as
scientific when nature (the only authority that science can have) cannot
possibly judge them BECAUSE they remain irrefutable?



(Incidentally, when I worked with Dr. H. Newsom, entomologist with the
L.S.U
Ag. Extension Div., during summers when I was in high school, one of his
many studies was on the impact of thrips on cotton production. And the
way
thrip population densities were sampled was by use of a substance called
"tanglefoot." We would smear tanglefoot on 6'' X 6'' squares, mount those
on a sticks and shove these into the ground at grid vertices, and at
scheduled times would take them down, count the thrips on each and log by
locations. This had to be done in conjunction with the timings of crop
sprayings and dustings, field testing new experimental pesticides, so the
samplings had to be done in several areas, and compared in such a way as
to
offset the other variables and extract, as it were, the "signal from the
noise" created by other variables.

JE:-
Yes, this is a basic sampling technique bases on statistics. What it allows
you to do is make the refutable claim that you have made a documented
observation of nature, i.e. an empirical observation. However the inductive
use of this fact as salient remains outside of statistics.


(In this sense, "noise" may be defined in the same manner that "weeds"
are:
as something that occurs where it is not wanted in a given place at a
given
time because it is not significant to the purpose at hand and which
requires
being removed or, if it cannot efficiently be removed, then evaluated in
such a way that its impact can be ruled out, or cancelled out, in process
of
arriving at a meaningful statistical analysis of the "signal" under focus.

JE:-
This is why random processes are entirely separated from nonrandom process
within the sciences. Statistics is employed to separate them. Random
processes are just "weeds" that have to be discarded. This is why I argue
that Dr Moran's redefinition of sampling error to become "random evolution"
and not remain as "random temporal variation" allows just an irrefutable
weed of "random evolution" to destroy the scientific credibility of
evolutionary theory as a product of the ONLY non random process that we
have: evolution via non random Darwinian selection. As I have previously and
very carefully explained (without any rebuttal being provide here by
anyone), Dr Moran is simply repeating the mistake of the discredited
mutationists. Their new toy was Muller's random mutation process which was
massively misused within the eugenics movement that it spawned. Today's new
toy is a more detailed knowledge as to what genes are and the random way in
which sampling error acts. This valuable new knowledge does NOT mean that
the old rule that selection can only operate on the phenotype and not the
genotype can now be discarded. This is because all heritable phenotypes
remain epistatically (non additively) coded for as Waddington proved time
and time again. However Waddington's attempted amendment of Haldane's
outdated bi-nomial population genetics distribution of two alleles at one
locus fell on reductive stony ground. The human genome is too small to allow
epistatic information to remain deleted as "inherited" but not "heritable"
and thus "selectable" (Fisher). The tiny size of the human genome and the
insignificant number of genes that are different within the human species
(only about 1500) and between the human species e.g. chimps or even just
worms made a mockery of Haldane's supposed Dilemma. To my knowledge no
professional here has ever admitted to the falsity of Haldane's Dilemma or
attempted to correct the false assumptions that Haldane had to make in order
to produce it. This includes Prof. Felsenstein who here, represents an
authority on Haldane's Dilemma. Felsenstein's extended debate with W. ReMine
(who wrote a book on this subject) never included any admittance by
Felsenstein that the assumptions that Haldane had employed to produce such
an utterly false dilemma were indeed, false. Yet exactly the same false
assumptions underpin Haldane's basic population genetics equations (which
Waddington tried but failed to correct) which in turn, underpin all of
population genetics which entirely dominates evolutionary theory today.
Their error was and remains: the deletion of almost all epistatic
information as non heritable within just a simplified/oversimplified model
that was misused to replace the theory it was simplified/oversimplified
from. I find it ironic that Waddington was Felsenstein's professor at
Edinburgh.

Moran's repeat of the mutationist error could have easily been avoided if
Moran et al had restricted themselves to providing refutable theories of
nature (as Popper correctly argued that they must). Moran et al have
misrepresented what evolutionary theory is, yet they continue to represent
evolutionary theory to the general public.



Dr. Newsom had us plant a control crop which was given no growth enhancers
and no poisons, but the control area was so poor in production and so
"eaten
up" by insects that to the point that -- had a farmer raised it, he would
not have 'picked' the cotton, but would have plowed it under and been done
with it.)

I mention the "tanglefoot" and the "noise" definition not because you are
not already familiar with them, but to make a couple of points: namely to
suggest the metaphor that each philosophical cul de sac, is enticing to
those too casual and too sophomoric and, at the end of each, is something
akin to tanglefoot.

JE:-
T think that you mistake statistics for philosophy.


Hence, anologically, it can be said that in one's dabbling, he might best
be
advised to look down each cul de sac, and upon seeing it is a dead end,
move
on. For an uninitiated student who thinks he has everything all figured
out, because he has just read one philosopher's ideas and is still
breathlessly enamored by them, one does well to point to a few paradoxes
that lie at the dead ends, as an antidote.

JE:-
Yes, but the epistemology of science relies on empirical testing against
nature to separate the sheep from the goats. Can you point out any paradoxes
that exist here?

snip for brevity<

Now... all that having been disclosed... I would like to share a few
thoughts with you now and then, without getting tanglefooted into an
interminably circular steering contest. If it becomes that, you win, by
default, because I shall give you the game rather than give up the time
and
energy it would require.

JE:-
Very _clearly_, I do not "win" anything but science does. I generate no
income, status or position from what I write. I will not accept irrefutable
mush as science simply because the scientific method will not accept it for
just obvious reasons.

snip<

What I am saying is that experience (which includes the kind of serious,
disciplined, honest, open-minded, creative observing and rationalizing we
call "science") does not lend itself to dealing neatly to being treated by
rigorous postulational thinking exclusively, for reasons having to do with
the limitations of our ability to witness everything, from every angle,
applying every possible interpretative organization of it, and for all
purposes.

JE:-
Either you generate theories of nature that can be tested by nature as your
only authority or you cannot. That is all.


But, to the chase now..., I had been enamored, for about four decades with
the importance of rigorous postulational thinking and, although I had
attributed many of the woes of mankind to our failure to avail ourselves
of
it, I had become decreasingly convinced of that, and increasingly aware
that
much of mankind's experience DOES NOT LEND itself to rigorous
postulational treatment.

JE:-
My argument was and remains: if you know that then it MUST refute that it is
true otherwise you become hopelessly lost within Epimenides paradox. Only if
you did not know that can it even be verified. At all times what you propose
remains irrefutable.


And the more I thought of that, the more I
realized that there are good and abundant reasons why we SHOULD NOT
expect
ourselves to be any more rational than experience ITSELF would enable us
to
put it to the task of making complete, logically consistent closure.

JE:-
Then you may end up burning witches all over again because history is doomed
to repeat itself.

snip<

1. I believe it is safe to say that none of us humans has omniscience.
That is, we cannot be everywhere at every instant witnessing and
rationalizing everything at all times with our senses;

JE:-
Yes, this is why only refutable propositions of nature can be allowed within
the sciences. Irrefutable propositions are the dictates of humans blessed
with "omniscience". Note: there are rather a LOT of them...


2. Even if we were omniscient, our sensory detection and sensory
interpretation mechanism are limited and fallible.

JE:-
Yes but if we were "omniscient" we would know that exactly and be able to
100% correct for it.

We discern only narrow
bands of signals among the signals given off (only a small portion of the
electro-magnetic spectrum, only sounds within certain ranges ...etc.)
(Note: I suspect that if we were NOT limited in our ability to see, hear,
smell ...etc., and could see all the electromagnetic frequencies, hear all
sounds, etc. we would barraged with so many signals, the sensory clamor
bombarding us would interfere with rational processing of any of it;

JE:-
Yes, we have an inherited ability to receive sensory inputs. However what
sense we make of them is NOT inherited. This sense requires INDUCTIVE
intelligence, i.e. theory building. This ranges in quality from things like
irrefutable aboriginal mythologies that are metaphorical type beliefs (which
lose their value when taken on face value) to hard science: e.g. refutable
Newtonian Mechanics and Darwinian evolution by natural selection which MUST
be taken on face value.


3. Experience is for the most part by far indirect (even when we "are
there" to witness the things we loosely think of as "first hand," due to
the
fact we do not experience a thing, itself, but repercussions of its being
and doing;

JE:_
Yes we only receive delayed sensory inputs. Why does this matter?


But here I will stop for now. There is much too much more to say, and
much
too little time or space.

I appreciate having someone to even broach these things to, because they
go
much farther off into
analysis of variables involved in human reason and argumentation than most
people care to venture...
and here I have not even yet scratched the surface.

Let me say, however, that these things are, I believe quite robustly, VERY
IMPORTANT TO THE KINDS OF THINKING AND REASONING OF SCIENCE
GENERALLY AND BIO-EVO IN
PARTICULAR.

snip<

Those who fancy themselves to be rigorous thinkers are the easiest to
befuddle by tossing a few paradoxes and dilemmas at them.

JE:-
I do not agree re: the epistemology of the sciences. Either all valid
theories that are offered as to what nature is supposed to be within the
sciences are testable by just the authority of nature itself or they are
NOT. Either all contending theories that are to be tested become tested in
a non biased orderly (efficient) way or they are NOT. Occam's Razor provides
the order in which they must be tested to maximize efficiency: simple first,
complex LAST. Bias can only be eliminated by allowing competition between
contending theories which can only exist within a free society.

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

edser@xxxxxxxxxx





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