Re: Evolution increases the computational ability of organisms.


"John Wilkins" <j.wilkins1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:fcucb6$2q6u$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

J.A.Legris wrote:

On Sep 17, 1:45 pm, dkomo <dkomo...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What does this mean? In Roger Lewin's _Complexity: Life at the Edge of
Chaos_, in Chapter 7 "Complexity and the Reality of Progress", he
interviews Norman Packard and there is the following exchange:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
I can see what might be meant by computation in organisms that have a
brain of reasonable size, I said to Norman, but what about clams and
trees? "Survival has to do with gathering information about the
environment and responding appropriately," Norman answered, clearly
echoing Ayala. "Bacteria do that, by responding to the presence or
absence of certain chemicals and by moving. Tree communicate
chemically
too. Computation is a fundamental property of complex adaptive
systems,
which, you'll remember, is optimized at the edge of chaos. Any complex
adaptive system can compute; that's the key point. You don't have to
have a brain to process information in the way I'm talking about it."
But it helps? "It's higher on the scale of computational ability, if
you like."

When you say "higher on the scale", I asked Norman, are you suggesting
a
history of successive increases in computational ability in evolution?
"That's how it looks to me," he replied. "Intuitively, it seems
reasonable that the task of survival requires computation. If that's
true, then selection among organisms will lead to an increase in
computational abilities. That creates an arrow of change, not just a
drift upward."

Most species on Earth today are single-celled organisms, as in the
pre-Cambrian, and much of the rest are insects, I said. That doesn't
look like inexorable progress to greater computational ability, does
it?
"We're talking about survival, " said Norman. "And, yes, there are
countless niches out there in which species do very well with certain
levels of computational abilities. But where survival is contested,
mostly you will see an increase. Think of it as a constant exploration
of the utility of increased computational complexity in evolution.
Sometimes it gives an advantage, and that gives you the arrow."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

--p. 138 & 139

Of course, this isn't exactly a new idea. Lewin writes:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
For example, in a classic text on evolution by Theodosius Dobzhansky,
Francisco Ayala, G. Ledyard Stebbins, and James Valentine, the "ability
to gather and process information" is said to have increased through
evolutionary history, and, indeed, to be a mark of progress. A few
years ago I attended a conference at the Field Museum in Chicago, where
the topic was "evolutionary progress." Francisco Ayala was one of the
first to speak. "The ability to obtain and process information about
the environment, and to react accordingly, is an important adaptation
because it allows that organism to seek out suitable environments and
resources and avoid unsuitable ones," he said. Edward O. Wilson also
considers information processing as a measure of complexity. "No
question about it," he told me. "There's been a gradual increase in
information processing over the last 550 million years, and
particularly
in the last 150 million years." If at least some biologists and the
dynamical systems people collectively point to information processing
as
a mark complexity, we may be getting somewhere.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

--p. 137 & 138

Here's an example of information processing inside E. coli:

"But how can an individual bacterium, locked into the genome it has
inherited, cope with environmental fluctuation?"

"Think, for instance, of an E. coli living in the erratic environment
of
a human colon, dependent for its nutrients on the whimsical eating
habits of its host. If the bacterium is deprived of the amino acid
tryptophan, which it needs to survey, it responds by activating a
metabolic pathway to make its own tryptophan from another compound.
Later, if the human eats a tryptophan-rich meal, the bacterial cell
stops producing tryptophan for itself, thus saving the cell from
squandering it resources to produce a substance that is available from
the surrounding solution in prefabricated form. This is just one
example of how bacteria tune their metabolism to changing
environments."

Campbell & Reese, _Biology_, 6th ed., p. 347

--dk...@xxxxxxxx


I think we need a general definition of information processing. I'll
start with this:

"Causal interactions that can be simulated exactly on a digital
computer"

There is an immediate problem here: only purely digital interactions
can satisfy the definition.

I don't see the relevance. All sorts of natural systems like the solar
system can be simulated on digital computers.

Evidently, natural systems have a degree
of such digital equivalence, but the material substrates get in the
way of the analysis.

What does this mean?

Information is any type of pattern that influences the formation or
transformation of other patterns. In this sense, there is no need for a
conscious mind to perceive, much less appreciate, the pattern. Consider,
for example, DNA. The sequence of nucleotides is a pattern that
influences the formation and development of an organism without any need
for a conscious mind. Systems theory at times seems to refer to
information in this sense, assuming information does not necessarily
involve any conscious mind, and patterns circulating (due to feedback)
in the system can be called information. In other words, it can be said
that information in this sense is something potentially perceived as
representation, though not created or presented for that purpose.

Generally, we cannot cleanly separate the
information processing from the implementation.

Any suggestions for a better definition?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_processing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information

I like:

Information as an influence which leads to a transformation

"Information is any type of pattern that influences the formation or
transformation of other patterns. In this sense, there is no need for a
conscious mind to perceive, much less appreciate, the pattern. Consider,
for example, DNA. The sequence of nucleotides is a pattern that
influences the formation and development of an organism without any need
for a conscious mind. Systems theory at times seems to refer to
information in this sense, assuming information does not necessarily
involve any conscious mind, and patterns circulating (due to feedback)
in the system can be called information. In other words, it can be said
that information in this sense is something potentially perceived as
representation, though not created or presented for that purpose."

In this sense, E. coli has a highly simplified representation of the
external world within its DNA and cytoplasm, and it can respond in
simple ways to signals from that world.

On this account of "information", it would seem that any regular causal
influence is information. Hence, all physical things are information. So
I wonder what use there is in calling anything information at all, let
alone genes. It simply fails to say anything other than "it is
physical".

I have said this very thing many, many times. The same is generally true for
the way "computation" is used. Also, to some extent the same thing occurs
when it is said that brains "process." What does "process" mean other than
some neurons 'fire,' and they make other neirons 'fire'"? I use "firing" for
action potentials, but I could easily have included generator potentials
and, possibly, gap junction type stuff.




The definitions of information that I know are causal, but are
restricted to some particular *type* of causality, usually that which
can be represented in a Turing machine, Shannon system or semantic
context.


--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."




.

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