Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

The place to start is to follow the presentment of published works by the Third Way folks.  The 3 guys who formed the society each present their most relevant book aimed at the general public.  The first book listed is not by any of them, so its message can be inferred to be the most effective in their minds.

http://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/books


Co-Founder, Raju Pookottil's, book is listed 7th:

Thanks for furnishing examples of the latest thinking in the Third Way group. For now, I have a few thoughts on Pookottil's BEEM: Biological Emergence-based Evolutionary Mechanism: How Species Direct Their Own Evolution.

From a review:

"When the network of billions of neurons in our brain passes simple signals between them, it generates intelligent solutions. Emergence and swarm intelligence are the fundamental principles that allow such signal networks to generate intelligence. BEEM argues that the complex signal networks that exist between the millions of protein molecules in a cell or the billions of cells that make up larger organisms are also capable of generating such intelligent solutions, albeit at a much slower pace. 

It is proposed that species, whether single cells, plants or animals, are able to meaningfully assess their environment, design clever solutions and, most importantly, pass them on to the next generation. The hypothesis argues that organisms are in control of their own genes and that they are able to manipulate and modify their genetic codes so as to incorporate any intelligently generated design modifications. In effect, species design themselves to near perfection over hundreds or thousands of generations. Using observable examples, BEEM builds up a strong case supporting these arguments."

Another review:

"The hypothesis essentially is that living organisms possess emergent intelligence at multiple levels, from the cellular to the societal, that this intelligence can generate gene mutations, that mutations are tested for fitness, and that the new genes can be passed on to subsequent generations. This chain of processes is set out with admirable clarity, the structure of the argument is well thought out, and a wealth of scientific studies is cited.

Pookottil is quite clear that he is attempting to overturn the central dogma of evolution's modern synthesis. He does not see DNA as the controller of the cell, but rather as a library created by the cell to store information. The cell's millions of molecules form a data network, each complying with very simple rules, but because of their large numbers, creating complex behaviour, in much the same manner as social insects do. This networking may occur between cells and tissues, as well as between individual organisms. The selfish gene of Dawkins is apparently a delusion.

While Pookottil's breadth of knowledge is impressive, the evidence cited is necessarily selective. He relies particularly heavily on Edward J Steele's Lamarck's Signature, which reviews the evidence for soma to germ line gene transfer. Neither author denies that natural selection occurs, but they doubt that it is the major driver of evolution. There is always a danger that enthusiasm for a new idea can trigger bias when assessing evidence, and this is exemplified by Pookottil's repeated references to a single study, which purports to show that Arabidopsis thaliana can replace a knocked out gene. As the author quite fairly points out, the study has not been replicated by other researchers.

Although it would be interesting to see a critique of BEEM by experts in molecular and evolutionary biology, overall I am most uncomfortable with Pookottil's rejection of parsimony. His explanation for evolution is many orders of magnitude more complex than natural selection, and relies on complexity if it is going to work. Descriptions of networks at various levels may sound plausible, but how they might be vertically integrated – i.e. from cells to tissues to whole organisms – is even more obscure. Nevertheless, it is important that the established consensus on any aspect of science is open to challenge, and for that reason the book is worth reading."


Comment:

The only source we know of through observation for the origin of complex specified information in the form of intricate irreducibly complex mechanisms is human sentient intelligence. Such creativity as exemplified to a very high degree in biology seems in our experience to require not just a high level of cognition, but also qualities like insight, imagination and an aesthetic sense. Biology in the form of living organisms even seems to exhibit the qualities of exuberance and sense of beauty. These characteristics seem to be that of conscious aware intelligence. 

Pookottil is hypothesizing that extended protein networks in numberless cells and multicellular organisms of a species somehow communicate as super networks to intelligently design innovative new biological solutions to current organismal problems. This intelligence is envisioned as an emergent property. I think that at present this is a rather nebulous concept. 

In theory of mind (at least as it applies to the human mind-brain problem), this emergence concept goes up against the so-called "hard problem" of qualia and the evident impossibility of mind, conscious awareness, being the result of mere data processing in either neuron/synapse networks of the brain or, presumably, any other sort of computational system. The notion of consciousness emerging from the operation and computation of complex networks has a lot of problems in philosophy and also empirically in the actual development of AI systems. In the interactive dualist theory of mind (which has a lot of evidence in paranormal phenomena), computational systems in themselves absolutely cannot exhibit awareness and consciousness. 

First, we would need empirical confirmation that cellular protein networks and/or networks of somatic cells can actually think and invent.

This thinking and inventing would have to extend not only to figuring out in detail how the body systems need to be modified, but also how to translate these functional requirements into specific actual DNA modifications, insertions, deletions, duplications, etc. in various genes, especially in developmental pathways. And even more importantly, this would have to lead to the creation of entirely new genes. This mapping function, starting with protein foldings and functions, is extremely intricate and is mostly way beyond any present knowledge in molecular biology. This high level of intentional cognition on the part of such networks would need to be demonstrated empirically.

Another area that would need to be fleshed out and empirically, experimentally demonstrated is the mechanism through which such extended intra- and inter-cellular networks actually insert their designed genetic changes into the cell. This would be some sort of mechanism through which the results of distributed creative cognition are transformed into actual physical genetic DNA changes in reproductive cells. It almost seems as if this would have to be the transforming of information at the level of conscious ideas into physical changes in physical structures. This gets into the mind-body problem again. Maybe it would have to involve some form of psi like telekinesis or psychokinesis.

Yet another area would be the mechanism of communication in the extended network - between separate somatic and reproductive cells in an organism and between separate animals or plants in the species. Would this have to be some form of psi or esp? 

Finally, a complete theory would need to somehow account for the origin of this extremely sophisticated system. It looks as if this would have to be some sort of monistic or panpsychist hypothesis, where mind just automatically emerges from complexity. 

Despite all the problems with it, this hypothesis has a lot of advantages. It seems to account for a lot of the observed characteristics of evolution, for instance its apparent indifference to the suffering often brought about by evolutionary creativity in parasitism, things like the Anopheles mosquito and malaria plasmodiums, and so on.