Posted: Nov 15, 2022 7:10 am
BWE wrote:
ETA: Not that biological evolution isn't a valid category, just that it is very hard to differentiate it from other emergent phenomena. Society, biome, species, etc. In most ways of looking at it, evolution is just complexity and a fitness landscape. Planets evolve, Solar systems, galaxies, etc.
I very much don't agree with this. Biological evolution is not like the others - it doesn't fit neatly into a category consisting of stellar and galactic evolution. It only works semantically because the term 'evolution' means change over time and in that way is applicable to all. But there is no fitness landscape for solar systems, galaxies etc., just as their intrinsic constitutional differentiation doesn't get inherited selectively into future iterations.
Metaphor can certainly be useful to generate creative mental associations and to convey complex information in a more familiar way, but stretched metaphors carry unrelated concepts where they have no actual coherent meaning.
Biological evolution has 3 necessary components, and if some other phenomenon lacks any of those three necessary ingredients, then it's not actually like biological evolution, even if it appears so.
My son's off school this week (APEC stops economic play!
) so I had him watch a breathlessly presented video on the golden ratio (evidence of the fearful and humbling reality of divine creation, no less) showing it found literally everywhere in everything and he was suitably awed. Then we watched a more skeptically inclined video that immediately dispelled the mystique by examining some of the claims with actual empirical measurement - the main take away is that the Golden Ration is 1.618 etc., not 1.74 or 1.59 - being 'close' has no significance whatsoever. If it is, it is... otherwise, it just ain't. Biological evolution just ain't like the others there aside from superficial semantics.