Re: The Genomic Contract

On Jan 19, 5:51 pm, "John W Edser" <ed...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jon_Roland <jon.rol...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:-


Today's brave new world of Polycentric Neo Darwinism does more than just
ignore all of the above, it reduces evolutionary theory to become just non
falsifiable mathematics because the polycentricity these mathematicians
embrace can only provide irrational contradictions within any theory of
science. I repeat: mathematics is not a science.

Mathematics is a great aid to science, however.
I haven't previously understood whaat you meant by polycentricity.
Your referral to reference frames totally confused me. You used a
physics analog that I don't think is valid. However, I came across
another physics related problem that may be a closer analog to the
"irrational contradictions" you find in "the central dogma" of
biology.
The problem of "contradiction" in your central dogma is analogous
to the "closure problem" in fluid dynamics. The problem is that the
separation of "inheritance" from "environment" is analogous to a
separation in scale. You are not really talking about polycentricity
in a theory, you are really talking about "closure." Without defining
the unit of selection, an analysis of phylogeny can't be closed.
Physicists work in a field called fluid mechanics. The fluid
mechanics I am thinking of is not relativistic and is not quantum
mechanical. It is fully classical and Galilean. Yet fluid mechanics
has a problem with determinism.
You might even say that we have a "central dogma" of classical
Galilean fluid mechanics. Fluids are made of atoms, all macroscopic
properties emerge from the motion of atoms, and information with
regard to the macroscopic properties can not influence the motion of
atoms. So in principal, classical Galilean fluid mechanics should be
100% deterministic. Yet we have "turbulence." What happened?
When doing a fluid mechanical determination, the atomic models
have too many degrees of freedom. Hence, they have to divide the fluid
into fluid elements that are intermediate in scale between an atom and
a full bulk fluid. However, the boundaries of a fluid element are
flexible. The fluid element can change shape and density unlike an
atom. However, the fluid element has no unambiguously defined
boundaries like a closed system. In some ways, the fluid element is
like a gene.
Another way to look at the closure problem in fluid dynamics is
to look at the "Reynold's decomposition." They split the variation in
fluid velocity into a time-averaged part and a rapidly fluctuating
part. The time-averaged part obeys all the large scale dynamics, and
the rapidly fluctuating part obeys the small scale dynamics. However,
over what period of time does the time-averaged part have to be
averaged in order to get this nice separation? No one knows. The
problem is not closed. What has to be done is that other assumptions
have to be thrown in, on top of the original "classical" mechanics.
If my analog is correct, I think you may have to wait a long time
before biologists get a grip on their closure problem. It took a long
time for physicists to even acknowledge there was closure problem.
Never the less, it is amazing how many important problems physicists
have solved without completely closing fluid mechanics. You should
appreciated the problems biologists solve without fully understanding
their "central dogma."
In any case, you should google "closure problem" and "fluid
mechanics." You won't understand all the fluid mechanics any better
than you understand relativity. But you may catch some ideas that will
help you express yourself better with regards to "the central dogma."
And I am not being polycentric about this.

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