Re: Directed evolution

On Dec 12, 12:03 pm, ohara...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:


Does "directed" imply a director or does it simply imply a process of
simpler organisms producing more complex ones by natural processes.



I'm not sure what the professional evolutionists think about Dawkins
these days, as he's become rabidly anti-theology [IMO, why bother?],
but you might be interested in his book "Climbing Mount Improbable"
from a few years ago.

The most notable comment I recall from the book is him saying in
effect, that evolution didn't work be taking huge singular leaps up
the sheer frontal face of Mt Improbable, but rather by taking tiny
incremental steps up the gentle back slopes of Mt Improbable. This is
a good analogy. Humans didn't evolve in one giant step from bacteria,
it took a "lot" of intermediary steps. It also took bacteria about 3
billion years just to evolve from single-celled forms into more
advanced multiple-celled forms.



Could "directed" evolution involving a director be somehow
differentiated from simple to complicated organisms via natural
processes?



I'll bet only a theologian could answer that one.



In physics (my field), you really cannot run processes backward
without running into entropy, how does evolution deal with this
issue?  I can imagine that on a micro-scale it is not a problem but on
a large scale it might be.  It appears that evolution produces order
out of chaos in violation of thermodynamics, is this simply a local
observation or a universal one?



As others have answered, organisms are open systems, with constant
energy flows into and out of them, and not closed systems. Those
energy flows [ultimately coming from the sun] are the driving forces
for all biology here on earth.

If physics is your field as indicated, it's surprising you're not
familiar with Prigogine's work, as others have mentioned, or with the
entire field of complexity theory, or self-organizing systems. This is
the idea that you can get complex organization stemming from
interactions between simple elements, but as mentioned, this only
happens in "open-systems" with energy flows coming in from without.

Some of us feel that the future of biology is systems biology, that
for instance, DNA/protein networks and organismic development need to
be understood from the perspective of complex systems theory and self-
organization [as said by someone with degrees in both straight
engineering and also biological engineering].




 I s'pose the question is if the order
produced by evolution is retained on time scales similar to the age of
the universe (unanswerable right now).



To turn that around, it appears that it took a similar order of time
scales [ie, 4-BY] in order to evolve the sorts of forms we have today,
starting from scratch. The gentle back slopes of Mt Improbable.




.

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