Spearthrower wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:I'll just ask whether there are, in the enterprise of studying flocking behavior in birds as "emergent"...

If emergent behavior is defined as an entity possessing properties its parts do not have...

Then what kind of bird behavior isn't emergent? Surely all and every behavior of every organism is emergent in this exact same way?

What actually isn't emergent? Is there anything in the universe that isn't emergent according to this definition?

The distinction would be between engineered outcome based things, like a bridge or a computer, and things which outcomes do not as easily apply. In terms of biology, we can engineer genomes to some extent. The interventions are based in mechanical models of gene structure. So we can make corn that expresses pest resistant chemicals. That is not the emergent part. The emergent part is what does that intervention do to the rest of the system at whatever level you choose to look at it.

There is very little in biology that is not studied in emergent terms but there is some.

To tie it back to this thread's actual topic - if we're discussing stuff now and its relationship with the origin of the universe, and given at the outset of the universe there were no atoms, and given that everything we observe is made of atoms, then following the definition, everything is emergent.

Why even call it 'emergence' - just call it 'the universe'.

Because emergence describes the process of boundary formation in adaptive systems.

Back to jam sandwiches having equal exemplificatory power?

What I know of what I think you do, I learned reading about Hari Seldon in Asimov’s Foundation series of books.

Unless I’m way off. Very likely.

Lol. The ecologist guy from dune is closer. But I like the whole mysterious avatar.

... evolution is a process with a mechanism.


thrower This is actually a lie, Darwin never said this at all. snip

Charles Darwin's favourite way of referring to his most famouse work was by use use of * its mechanism.

Charles Dawins favourite way of referring to his most famouse work was by use of the * processes mechanism.

The process of Darwinian evolution hails from a naturalists perspective, not the biologists.

Charles Darwin proposed a process to answer the speciation question. The study of biology confirms his initial instinct.

process1
/ˈprəʊsɛs/
See definitions in:
All
Computing
Printing
Law
Biology
noun
1.
a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.
"military operations could jeopardize the peace process" snip

I take the mechanism of Darwinian evolution as a series of actions. And correctly refer to evolution as a process.

I propose that "evolution" can be ligitmatly seen as a process under dictionary meaning; all criteria met.

Paul

pfrankinstein wrote:... evolution is a process with a mechanism.


thrower This is actually a lie, Darwin never said this at all. snip

Charles Darwin's favourite way of referring to his most famouse work was by use use of * its mechanism.

So he never once said, as you've claimed many, many times that "evolution is a process with a mechanism"?

Are you now acknowledging that, or are you going to provide page and line reference?

I take the mechanism of Darwinian evolution as a series of actions. And correctly refer to evolution as a process.

And we both know very well that you learned to use the word 'process' only after dozens of people had first used the word in response to your claims that were absent this word.

Incidentally, this is what makes you sound like the Monty Python sketch with Anne Elk and her theory that it is, is a theory.

Whether you refer to evolution as a process or not has no bearing on anything as no one has ever challenged this - you ignore the actual challenges and keep declaring yourself having successfully completed a challenge no one has actually set you.

one bang = one process' then 'selection' must have began at the beginning

It's clear some people aren't at all able to follow Paul's argument, so here to remind them.

a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.

BWE wrote:

romansh wrote:

pfrankinstein wrote:
The mix up between NS AS and HS concerns me.

Does not worry me too much as the mix-up is all yours.

The categories between artificial and natural are definitional boundaries. When I find chalcanthite it is deemed natural, when I leach copper metal with sulphuric acid (and air) and evaporate the water to crystallize copper sulphate pentahydrate, is that somehow artificial?

It certainly seems to be a non useful distinction.

Paul, what does it gain us to make these distinctions?

A thought provoking question sir thank you.

A thought-provoking question, sir, thank you. 

The proposal that "evolution" = "process" weighs heavily on my mind.

If evolution is a process, then you can inquire as to its origin.

If you equate the subject to only biology or speciation, you cannot get past the primordial soup.

You can explain what happened through disassociated subjects in physics, chemistry, and biology.

the emergence of each subject in chronological order yet without a direct link to another. Shame.

If nature was calculating and portraying a physical result in the inorganic world vastly before Darwinian NS, do we have a name for that type?

Paul.



https://youtu.be/C_JdKJQPS9I






 

You need to approach the question the right way round.

Starting now and seeking the path backwards doesn't tell you about all the contingent quantities which were and remain inherently unpredictable, as in, would not result in the same sequence were time replayed. Instead you need to start at the beginning and look at each system as it arises, what state it arises from, what local influences etc.

Predominantly, I think your questions can be explained most simply by the arrow of time, and that there's no more to it than that.

The same answer you're attempting to propose makes spectacles a necessary end.

Spearthrower wrote:

pfrankinstein wrote:... evolution is a process with a mechanism.


thrower This is actually a lie, Darwin never said this at all. snip

Charles Darwin's favourite way of referring to his most famouse work was by use use of * its mechanism.

So he never once said, as you've claimed many, many times that "evolution is a process with a mechanism"?

Are you now acknowledging that, or are you going to provide page and line reference?

If Evolution is not a process that explains speciation, that explanation reaffirmed by biology then what is it sir..

I'm so glad you encapsulate and claim the understanding of entire subject as you do.

Can I rationally describe evolution as a process sir?

All criteria met.

Charles Darwin proposed a process to answer the speciation question.

Paul.

pfrankinstein wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

pfrankinstein wrote:... evolution is a process with a mechanism.


thrower This is actually a lie, Darwin never said this at all. snip

Charles Darwin's favourite way of referring to his most famouse work was by use use of * its mechanism.

So he never once said, as you've claimed many, many times that "evolution is a process with a mechanism"?

Are you now acknowledging that, or are you going to provide page and line reference?

If Evolution is not a process that explains speciation, that explanation reaffirmed by biology then what is it sir..

A statement that's only been contested once, as far as I recall, with respect to one obscure point.

Calling it a 'process' doesn't mean anything special - that it's a process doesn't mean it especially requires explaining the origins of anymore than one must explain the origins of anything if that is what one wishes to do. See jam sandwiches.

Regardless of the fact that you are still trying to make hay out of this when it's of no consequence whatsoever, you routinely ignore problems arising from your speculation, for example, that a process can exist in a proto-state independent any of the variables that form that process.

I know, from long experience, that you can't and won't address this - your song and dance with repeatedly stating 'process' is itself a means of evasion.

pfrankinstein wrote:I'm so glad you encapsulate and claim the understanding of entire subject as you do.

This is a much repeated attempt at poisoning the well, as always.

And of course, as always, I will refer you back to the fact that it is never me who says things like 'I claim to understand the entire subject' - it is always you who attempts to put these words in my mouth. Not once, or twice, but repeatedly.

pfrankinstein wrote:Can I rationally describe evolution as a process sir?

According to the definition you gave above, then I do not accept that what you mean by process is what is actually justified.

Your dictionary reference included:

a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.

This is not true of any of the selection discussed in this thread other than "artificial selection".

It is not true of the Big Bang, it is not true of solar system evolution, it is not true of biological evolution, of footprints in dogshit, or any of the natural processes discussed throughout, and knowing your penchant for equivocation, I do not accept it as such.

This, I need to remind certain people incapable of following the written arguments, is the main problem underlying all of your claims - directionality towards biological evolution is not to be found in the Big Bang, being able to trace the development of the universe back in time - a pathway which must actually have occurred - doesn't mean that any state found in the contemporary universe was present or selected for at the origins of the universe.

pfrankinstein wrote:All criteria met.

Charles Darwin proposed a process to answer the speciation question.

Again, to remind the reader of what actually occurred, Paul originally stated something else, then myself and others corrected him by saying that Darwin's theory is concerned with speciation, and thus it becomes Paul telling us what we originally told him.

Yes Paul, we all know that Darwin's idea is concerned with how speciation occurs. Feel free to acknowledge what other people say whenever you build up the integrity to stop stealing other peoples' ideas and pretending they're your own.

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post2 ... n#p2782275

Similarly, Charls Darwin only noticed EVOLUTION by observing speciation.

See how it 'evolves' over time?

You say one thing, argue incessantly over it, then simply take up a contrary position - one given by others in response to you - and then argue that incessantly as if that's what you've been trying to claim all along, and everyone's being unreasonable. I guess this bullshit has worked once, despite me saying it's never going to succeed.

Speciation wasn't actually a thing conceived of before, Darwin. That's kind of the entire point of why Darwin is remembered. For most of human history, species were seen as fixed quantities created as is.

So he didn't answer the speciation question by observing speciation, as that's just jumbled nonsense the kind of which indicates what the true state of your grasp of the topic is, but rather Darwin saw different traits in distributed populations that seemed suited - adapted to local environments, and hypothesized that not only did this come about by natural selection, but that this principle of adaptations accruing over generations could thereby provide, through extension, a naturalist account of the diversity of life.

At any point, you are perfectly free to stop pretending you know what Darwin wrote - the only way is up in this respect - not least because there is no value to you in pretending anyway - what some historical figure said about it is irrelevant, Paul. Darwin did not use the words you keep trying to put in his mouth, and you don't bolster your own ideas by repeatedly name-dropping him. What Darwin did and what you've done are not in the slightest bit analogous.

pfrankinstein wrote:

BWE wrote:

romansh wrote:

pfrankinstein wrote:
The mix up between NS AS and HS concerns me.

Does not worry me too much as the mix-up is all yours.

The categories between artificial and natural are definitional boundaries. When I find chalcanthite it is deemed natural, when I leach copper metal with sulphuric acid (and air) and evaporate the water to crystallize copper sulphate pentahydrate, is that somehow artificial?

It certainly seems to be a non useful distinction.

Paul, what does it gain us to make these distinctions?

A thought provoking question sir thank you.

A thought-provoking question, sir, thank you. 

The proposal that "evolution" = "process" weighs heavily on my mind.

If evolution is a process, then you can inquire as to its origin.

If you equate the subject to only biology or speciation, you cannot get past the primordial soup.

Google "autocatalytic sets".


At any rate, Paul, here's my thoughts about that. How we frame something is related to what question we are interested in asking. So if we want to understand something about ecology on Earth, we would want to limit the field of evolution to the boundaries that affect the biosphere. If, further, we wanted to ask questions regarding the development of species of life within that biosphere, we would want to limit it once again and etc. This is called reductionism and it is incredibly useful for learning about parts of a system.

If your question involves life, there are lots of reasons to apply reductive frameworks because life is already a reduced part of the larger system and there are lots of reducable components within the category. Whether those reductive frameworks can then be expanded back up to the systems levels above is, I believe, also an important question because at each level, new characteristics emerge which are not present in the levels below. And each of those levels require new names and sometimes new ideas to describe and to understand them.

It turns out that there is no way to predict most emergent properties of a system.

Given those points, it makes sense to me to consider evolution as an overall category that describes all kinds of change over time. But biological evolution also makes sense as a particular subset of evolution because it is a particular expression of evolution. If you were interested in questions that do not need to go beyond primordial soup, then it is fine to reduce your landscape to natural selection and fitness landscapes. If, further, you wanted to investigate the impact of human choices and actions on that landscape, it would possibly make sense to create a category and call it human selection.

But, human selection would still be nested within natural selection and natural selection would still be nested within adaptive systems which could be applied to the whole universe if you wanted to.

You can explain what happened through disassociated subjects in physics, chemistry, and biology.

the emergence of each subject in chronological order yet without a direct link to another. Shame.

Well, when we first discovered each of those subjects the connections between them were not obvious and, as I said earlier, reductionism is incredibly useful for understanding.

But if one were to use the lens of one discipline as the "true" lens, that would indeed be problematic. So, the chemical, physical, or biological descriptions of parts of a system are not shameful in and of themselves. They are simply reduced views of the systems being considered.

Expanding those views back up to the larger system is often quite difficult. That doesn't mean those lenses aren't useful, just that science is hard and nature is complex.

And models need to be useful. No model can lay claim to truth. But utility is the metric, not truth. Those reductionist models have tremendous utility. It is important though, I believe, to always keep the higher levels in mind and to recognize that utility is very situational. You could use hydrogen bombs to clear landscapes for construction but a higher level view suggests that might not be a good idea.

If nature was calculating and portraying a physical result in the inorganic world vastly before Darwinian NS, do we have a name for that type?

Paul.

 

I think we do. Adaptive systems. But what do you mean specifically by "if nature was calculating"? Complexity itself is emergent as far as we can tell. It only takes a few rules and conditions for complexity to emerge.

Spearthrower wrote:You need to approach the question the right way round.

Starting now and seeking the path backwards doesn't tell you about all the contingent quantities which were and remain inherently unpredictable, as in, would not result in the same sequence were time replayed. Instead you need to start at the beginning and look at each system as it arises, what state it arises from, what local influences etc.

I think we agree exactly here. But I'm curious where you draw the line at generizability. Do you see any generalizable principles or the possibility and usefulness of generalizable principles that are not expressions of chemistry and physics? I mean, that's what natural selection is, right?

Predominantly, I think your questions can be explained most simply by the arrow of time, and that there's no more to it than that.

That's an awfully big "no more to it" you've got there.

The same answer you're attempting to propose makes spectacles a necessary end.

BWE wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:You need to approach the question the right way round.

Starting now and seeking the path backwards doesn't tell you about all the contingent quantities which were and remain inherently unpredictable, as in, would not result in the same sequence were time replayed. Instead you need to start at the beginning and look at each system as it arises, what state it arises from, what local influences etc.

I think we agree exactly here. But I'm curious where you draw the line at generizability. Do you see any generalizable principles or the possibility and usefulness of generalizable principles that are not expressions of chemistry and physics? I mean, that's what natural selection is, right?

Predominantly, I think your questions can be explained most simply by the arrow of time, and that there's no more to it than that.

That's an awfully big "no more to it" you've got there.

The same answer you're attempting to propose makes spectacles a necessary end.

Name an adaptive system that isn't an organism or community of organisms, and explain how this use of terminology isn't bending "adaptive" into a colloquialism. Yes, there are adaptive systems that are "artificially" created, but then we're just smearing out the distincion or else trying to make it too sharp. This risks doing the same kind of equivocation that Paul lives on. So smile when you say, "generalizable". Everything's generalizable if you deploy enough equivocation. Certainly, the environment of communities of organisms changes in response to the environmental impact of the communities, but how far do we want to stretch "adaptive", here? Holism (as in Gaia conversation) is aimed at modifying the behavior of one species, and is part of the same old humanist piffle-wiffle. Holism is a response, but calling it an adaptation is done for the sake of the usual filosofeezing.

An atmosphere. The word you are looking for is feedback.

The question as I would frame it is at what point and under what conditions does self organization begin to affect the adaptive process. There are a number of approaches to this question and a few answers. And we are back to nomenclature and generalizability. A convection cell is both self organizing and adaptive but is not some of the other things that are commonly used in the exploration of adaptive systems. Notably agent based modeling isn't particularly useful in modeling the adaptive processes.

Or maybe it would make more sense to you to use the notion of a dissipative system rather than an adaptive system. Entropy is deeply connected to emergence in that within a dissapative or adaptive system, there is negative entropy. So one useful threshold seems to be the development of negative entropy regions. There are a great many ways to tell the story and the utility of any is dictated by what questions you are trying to ask or it is possible to ask.

Hasn't Holling given us a reliable, scalable framework by which to map complex ecological systems and adaptive processes - one in which evolution is fully integrated?