Universal Darwinism and the definition of life

When I was a child I learned in science class that distinguishing living systems from flames and crystals using a definition was hard, and that the best approach was to use a 'MR GRENS' definition - an acronym which defined life as involving: Movement, Respiration, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition, and Sensation. As a fairly intelligent child, this definition was not very satisfying.

Later in life I learned about evolutionary theory. It became clear that life was what evolved. I found this idea had been codified by J. Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary - in "The Origins of Life", p.3:

What is life? [...]

An alternative is to define as living any population of entities possessing those properties that are needed if the population is to evolve by natural selection.

Still later I learned about Universal Darwinism, and the project of Darwinizing physics. The principles of Darwinian evolution were not confined to biology. They applied to inorganic systems - propagating cracks, electrical discharges, turbulence, drainage systems, etc.

At this point it became clear that the Maynard Smith / Szathmary conception of living systems had some issues. Either practically everything was alive, or this definition of life was in need of a rethink.

The latter option seems much more attractive than attempting to change the meaning of a common concept.

I think the concept of systems that exhibit cumulative adaptive evolution is more appropriate as a definition of life. Evolution by natural selection just isn't enough to pin the concept on life-as-we-know-it.

One problem with this idea is that it arguably includes structures such as drainage basins - which evolve adaptively over extended periods. For would classify drainage basins as being "alive". This definition may not be perfect - but it seems like a step forwards. At least cumulative adaptive evolution excludes many cases of degenerative Darwinism.

Darwinian physics

Positional inheritance and velocity inheritance offer high fidelity transmission of information when physical objects split - allowing for adaptations to arise in physical systems. Copying with variation and selection in physics is a relatively simple and obvious application of Darwinism.

Darwinian physics is currently mostly an unknown topic in the mainstream. There's some Quantum Darwinism out there - but it is hard for most people to assess the worth of this material. Darwinian models apply well to fairly simple Newtonian systems. These models are more comprehensible and should be easier for most people to understand and accept.

Darwinian physics lacks some of the complications that cause social scientists to get into muddles about memes. For instance, simple physical systems have pretty undirected variation - allowing the standard neo-Darwinian assumption that mutations are random with respect to fitness to be applied - without much loss of modeling realism. The simple physical systems used as examples in Darwinian physics are easier to understand than the complex structures involved in human cultural evolution.

Darwinian physics has been worked on. Bickhard and Campbell's 2003 paper covers the topic - listing crystal growth, convection cells and catalysis as targets of explanation. D. B. Kelley's book on Universal Darwinism also covers it. However, for whatever reason, the subject area has not yet become mainstream knowledge.

Physicists are reasonable people. It seems reasonable to expect that they will regard the project of Darwinizing physics with less hostility than social scientists regard the project of Darwinizing culture.

Another reason to put energy into Darwinian physics is that physics has historically been a "high-status" science. If physicists come to accept that Universal Darwinism applies to basic inorganic physical systems, that will be a big and important feather in the cap of Darwinism.

One of the things I think that physicists will expect to see is the relationship between Universal Darwinism and the maximum entropy principle. Another is the relationship between Darwinism and the anthropic principle.

Social science is still the area of greatest social and political importance for evolutionary theory. It's the area where there's the greatest need for correct, Darwinian science. It's the area where backwards, pre-Darwinian science is doing the most damage. It's an area where religious attempts to distort science get a lot of funding. However, Darwinian physics can contribute to this project indirectly - by helping to apply increased pressure to the social scientists on multiple fronts.

References

• Tyler, Tim (2014) Darwinian physics (the video!)
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Positional inheritance
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Velocity inheritance
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Observation of the observable
• Tyler, Tim (2012) Universal Darwinism
• Kelley, D. B. (2012) The Origin of Everything
• Campbell, John (2015) Darwin Does Physics
• Campbell, John (2014) Darwin does physics
• Campbell, John (2012) Universal Darwinism (Welcome)
• Dawkins, Richard (2009) Applying Darwinian Evolution to Physics

Production and elimination diagrams

In my 2011 book on memetics, in the chapter on Universal Darwinism, I proposed that there were numerous advantages in classifying evolutionary events into the categories "production" and "elimination" instead of "selection" and "drift". The concepts are especially appropriate when teaching evolutionary theory.

My proposed division broadly matches the "creation" / "destruction" dichotomy - though we can't easily use those terms, because they are not always technically correct.

I later made a video promoting the idea titled Natural production and natural elimination.

Today, I have some new diagrams - showing how the concepts of "production" and "elimination" are orthogonal to "selection" and "drift".

These concepts are similar to those proposed by Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbjorn Knudsen at the beginning of Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution.

Hodgson and Knudsen's proposal is in chapter 1 - which is available online here. They call the intersection of selection and elimination "subset selection" and the intersection of selection and production "sucessor selection".

My proposal is better, though. Hodgson and Knudsen subdivide selection, but they don't seem to notice that precisely the same division can naturally be extended to subdivide drift as well.

Meme contexts and gene contexts

Apparently, one of the things anthropologists dislike about memes is the way they subdivide culture.

Here is Maurice Bloch in 1995:

In sum, the culture of an individual, or of a group is not a collection of bits, traits or memes, acquired from here and there, any more than a squirrel is a collection of hazelnuts.

[For context for the quote, see [here.]

My usual (patronizing) reply is that it's a basic scientific modeling technique to split thing up into pieces and analyze the pieces. It's called "reductionism" - and it is one of the most successful tools in the scientific toolkit.

Nonetheless, some anthropologists apparently think that memeticists focus too much on the bits of culture, and not enough on how the bits interact.

My way of framing this criticism (within the terminology of memetics) is that they are saying that memeticists focus too much on the memes, and not enough on meme contexts. By "meme context" I mean: everything else in the universe, apart from the meme in question.

Memetics does pay some attention to meme contexts. There's memetic hitchhiking, memetic linkage, meme-gene coevolution, selection pressures, development - and other effects.

However, I think that phrasing the criticism this way illustrates that there's a grain of truth to the accusation - and also suggests why meme contexts might be being somewhat neglected: they are large, complex and difficult to analyze.

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,

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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.