Re: Stephen Wolfram vs. Charles Darwin on natural selection


"William Morse" <wdNOSPAmorse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:gi6c98$2vku$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
r norman wrote:
On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:16:12 -0500 (EST), William Morse
<wdNOSPAmorse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Your comments to Perplexed indicate the difficulties in using
Kolmogoroff complexity. Is that really in any way a useful method for
ranking organisms by complexity?

Actually I think it is, and I think it will become more so as we
understand more about development. I think we will be able to rank
organisms on the basis of developmental complexity, i.e. on the number
of steps and subprograms in the developmental algorithm required to
produce the organism.

Okay, but it would have to be *functional*-developmental complexity as far
as I care!

This is probably not exactly the same as
Kolmogorov complexity, but it seems pretty close to me. Obviously there
will be a gray area when there is significant environmental input in
development, but I never promised you a rose garden :-)

Good to see someone showing a clear sign of "tolerance-principledness" (with
some teasyness thrown in)! ;)


Of course there is at least one other type of complexity in biota, which
I will call cytoplasmic complexity for lack of knowing whatever the real
term is. Forgoing the comparison of an amoeba with a neurocyte, how do
I compare the complexity of a human neurocyte with that of a lamprey?
Even supposing that the human is developmentally more complex than a
lamprey, that would say nothing about the relative complexity of their
neurocytes.

But I would not say that means there is no way to define that
complexity, and I would think as we learn more about proteomics we may
be able to address that question as well.

Nice to see a sign of this kind of optimism!

Dammit if we ever allow ourselves to be defeated by the difficulty of
defining functional-developmental "complexity". It is a too intuitively
obvious an Evolution-codefining Property To ever give up trying until it is
Tolerably defined.

(Actually, I already accEPT "increasing complexity" as the most general
definition of an evolutionary process or ditto patterning trend.)



.

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