Velocity inheritance

I previously nominated positional inheritance as the most common kind of inheritance. The second-most common kind is probably velocity inheritance. The term "Velocity inheritance" refers to the way in which entities that split tend to inherit their parent's velocity. The offspring pieces tend to inherit the velocity of their parents.

Turbulence illustrates velocity inheritance fairly clearly. Or think of the way the targets break up in clay pigeon shooting.

Velocity inheritance is quite a lot like positional inheritance - but there are some differences:

Positional inheritance is always high-fidelity. However, the fidelity of velocity inheritance breaks down considerably when the particles involved become very small. In particular if the offspring particles are neutrinos or photons, velocity inheritance is not very high fidelity. You can also see poor velocity inheritance if you smash small objects into much larger ones at enormous speeds.

Some may find that velocity inheritance is easier to understand than positional inheritance. Velocity is more obviously a property of objects that is copied when they divide. Others find it more confusing - and get caught up in (irrelevant) concerns about relativity and frames of reference.

Other "simple" properties are inherited too when entities split - mass, angular momentum, charge, etc. The inheritance is not not always which such high fidelity as is seen in position or velocity inheritance.

Peter Richerson: Tribal Social Instincts, Gene-Culture Co-Evolution

Peter Richerson on human "tribalism". Peter says:

Culture is a form of inheritance. It is something like genes. We get it from someone else.

This is the central organizing principle of memetics.

Matt Ridley: The Cultural Equivalent of Sex

Matt discusses an idea close to the heart of memetics - memetic recombination. Or, as he puts it, "ideas having sex".

I have some issues with Matt's thesis here. See here for details.

The neo-Darwinian dogma that individuals do not evolve

Notoriously, evolutionary theory applies to populations. For evolution to operate, you need to have a population of variants for natural selection to choose between.

That evolutionary theory doesn't apply to individuals is enshrined in definitions of evolution, and is in textbooks (for example, Mark Ridley's "Evolution" textbook).

Here's Douglas Futuyma (1998):

The development, or ontogeny, of an individual organism is not considered evolution: individual organisms do not evolve.

Here's Larry Moran (2012):

Note that biological evolution refers to populations and not to individuals. In other words, populations evolve but individuals do not. This is a very important point. It distinguishes biological evolution from other forms of evolution in science (e.g., stellar evolution).

Here's Graham Bell (1997):

Individuals do not evolve; they develop, reproduce, and die. The characteristics of organisms, however, may change through time.

However, in universal Darwinism, individuals do evolve. Their brains evolve via learning. Their bodies evolve during development. Most Darwinian individuals are, in fact, populations on closer examination. Animals are populations of cells. Cells are populations of bacteria. Bacteria are populations of molecules. Molecules are populations of atoms - and so on. Many of those populations clearly evolve over time - event by completely standard evolutionary theory.

What are the neo-Darwinians thinking about? It isn't clear - but I think they are maybe trying to divide the evolutionary process up - so it only applies to one population (or level) at a time.

This seems silly. You can't have a system evolving from one perspective and not evolving from another one. Herbert Spencer's concept of a single unified evolutionary process is far superior. Here's Herbert Spencer (1862):

there are not several kinds of Evolution having certain traits in common, but one Evolution going on everywhere after the same manner.

Long ago, the idea that individuals were themselves composed of populations was not understood. It took a while to understand that these populations evolved by Darwinian mechanisms in a non-trivial way over individual lifespans. However, now this is understood. The idea that individuals do not evolve is outdated dogma. Dogma often takes a while to die - and this is a case in point.

Tim Tyler: Observation of the observable

Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a video about incorporating observers and observations into Darwinism.

Universal Darwinism generalizes many of the principles of evolutionary theory, giving it a broader range of applicability and extending it to cover the inanimate world. One such principle is natural selection. Universal selection applies broadly to the natural world, harvesting asteroids and atoms - as well as ants and aardvarks.

A closely-related concept that can be similarly generalized is "survival of the fittest". Richard Dawkins, writing on page 12 of "The Selfish Gene", wrote:

Darwin's survival of the fittest is really a specific case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things.

This proposed law of "survival of the stable" has subsequently not received proper attention. However it too is a specific case of a more general law, which might be referred to as: "observation of the observable".

Dealing with observability implicitly includes all cases of survival - since, in order to be observed, entities must have survived. However it expands the scope of original idea in two ways - to include:

• Potential observables being hidden, and...
• Observers failing to observe fully;

With this modification, Darwinism can be accurately applied to entities which are merely hidden - instead of ones that have failed to survive. This allows evolutionary theory to be applied to cases such as the Tall poppy syndrome - where entites are selected on the basis of their visibility - rather than because their competitors failed to survive.

Survival - from "survival of the fittest" is an important determinant of what we observe, but it is not the only factor involved.

The new principle also incorporates selection effects acting on observers and their perceptual apparatus into evolutionary theory. Such effects have classically been studied in the context of "the anthropic principle". However, the term "anthropic" was always unfortunate - since it implies the effect only applies to humans - whereas, in fact, any observer will do: animals and machines can act as observers too. Universal Darwinism brings observation effects under the umbrella of evolutionary theory. It includes cases where observers are sleepy, deluded, lacking awareness, or have perceptual limits.

Darwinism is the most appropriate framework for modeling the effect of selection on observations and observers. The expansion of Darwinism to deal with "observation of the observable" is long overdue. Previous iterations of the theory have made no mention of observations or observers, but this development puts them back into Darwinism at its heart. To fully explain scientific observations, we have no choice but to use the more general and broadly-applicable principle.

Njoy,

---

For more on this topic, see: Observation selection classified

TED memes visualized

This video is titled: "Eric Berlow and Sean Gourley: Mapping ideas worth spreading".

The video constructs the "meme-ome" of each TED talk (from its transcript) and then visualizes their relationships as a network in 2D and 3D.

It's nice to see the meme terminology on TED. I write "memeome" rather than "meme-ome" - but we'll see which becomes more popular.

Hashtag gestural meme

OK, this is a current internet meme. My excuse is that it's a meta meme. Or at least it's about hashtags, twitter and social media. The blurb reads:

Jimmy Fallon & Justin Timberlake show you what a Twitter conversation sounds like in real life.

The video features a "gestural meme" that I hadn't seen before - the gesture for hashtags. Probably like a few other people who have watched this video, I might be using that one myself in the future.

The video has news coverage - here's CNET (Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon mock #hashtagmania) and TheVerge (Watch this: Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon show us what hashtag abuse really sounds like).

The divisive influence of cultural variation

Cultural variation can act to obscure genetic differences - or to magnify them.

On the left we see culture amplifying genetic differences - while on the right is an example of culture obscuring them.

There's a strong theoretical reason to expect cultural differences to be correlated with genetic differences: since both are correlated with distance between the populations being compared. Of course, in the modern world, egalitarian memes do their best to reverse this effect.

Probably cultural variation within groups is minimised by transmission processes and pro-egalitarian memes. However on larger scales, drift probably dominated over most of the course of human evolution. In this case, cultural variation seems likely to have acted as a significant divisive force between humans from different tribes. The effects of cultural variation can be large. Cultural differences may well represent a more powerful stimulus to kin recognition mechanisms than genetic variation does.

The divisive influence of cultural variation may go some way to explaining the human tendency towards xenophobia. Cultural variation may be acting as a superstimulus to kin-recognition mechanisms, causing strangers to appear especially alien.

Wanted: everyday examples of natural elimination

Elimination, as part of Universal Darwinism represents a ubiquitous collection of processes.

I've been looking for familiar and "everyday" examples of elimination - for my next book. I want to show how processes involving cumulative elimination which apply to inanimate objects - as well as to biological entities. Here are some of the examples I have come up with so far:

• Fridges gradually fill up with useless, rarely-eaten foodstuffs;
• Wallets gradually fill up with low-denomination coins.

These are useful and good examples. However, both illustrate elimination gradually making the situation worse via the removal of desirable items. I've got one 'everyday' example of elimination gradually making the situation better via the removal of dud or broken items. Here it is:

• Glasses in a drinks cabinet are not chipped or cracked - since any such glasses get trashed.

Can readers think of any better familar examples of elimination in action?

Marion Blute: Discussion of sociocultural evolution

Marion Blute discusses the current state of social and cultural evolution.

The Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab has a YouTube channel is here.

This video is from the 2013 Summer Interviews on Evolution playlist - from the 2013 International Summer School on Evolution.