Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

How does "mind" come in to this? I can agree with much of what you say (assuming I've understood it correctly), and I doubt most biologists would disagree with the idea that life involves a mutual, sometimes sign-based exchange of information. But none of that needs "mind". The production and reading of these "frozen-accident" signals is biochemical, not intelligent.

Linda

Their is no awareness in chemicals.  It is not a property of materials.  Awareness of signals with a motive to decode them is mental work.  The amount of work, as gains in order, organization and specific facts can be charted and measured.

After exchange of information - such as a sensation of reflected light from the immediate environment - one would say the the organism gained information.  The organism now has mutual information in common with the environment, such as the approach of another organism.  This situation is expressed as the organism knows the presence of the other organism.  If the organism knows whether the approach is friend or foe - then the organism is said to understand.

Knowing, recognizing and understanding are not the process called mind?   

(oh come on now)

Whether there is natural design depends entirely on your definition of design.

The idea that it is proceeding entirely by random events is nonsensical anyway. Why is mind required for living things to evolve to adapt to the environment?

~~ Paul

I have posted a definition of design, you seemed to have had no objection at the time.  Not understanding what happens during the design process is hampering your view.  After design, measurable decreases in entropy of the state of a system must be in evidence. 

The idea that entropy - and its opposite (negentropy) information-  are not real and measurable seems to be a surprise each time we talk.  It is nonsensical to think if you start a chem reaction and exclude oxygen - that the result with have oxidized molecules.

Likewise, if you start a thing, event or process and exclude order and mutual information - that you will get results that are more organized then when you started is just as ridiculous, in terms of quantifiable science.

I have no idea what you're talking about here.

~~ Paul

  DESIGN: (noun) a specification of an object, manifested by some agent, intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements, subject to some constraints.

I was trying to say that the problem-solving of organisms with their environments are encoded as the natural language of living things.  Each and every bio-chemical "accident" had to be encoded to keep it useful and functional.  

A design is object (physical or informational) that has taken mutual information between living things and their environments and encodes how it was solved.

Let me ask you - is a logic gate a design?

 In electronics, a logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function; that is, it performs a logical operation on one or more binary inputs and produces a single binary output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and unlimited fan-out, or it may refer to a non-ideal physical device[1] (see Ideal and real op-amps for comparison).

Logic gates are primarily implemented using diodes or transistors acting as electronic switches, but can also be constructed using vacuum tubes, electromagnetic relays (relay logic), fluidic logic, pneumatic logic, optics, molecules, or even mechanical elements. With amplification, logic gates can be cascaded in the same way that Boolean functions can be composed, allowing the construction of a physical model of all of Boolean logic, and therefore, all of the algorithms and mathematics that can be described with Boolean logic. - wiki

I have posted a definition of design, you seemed to have had no objection at the time.  Not understanding what happens during the design process is hampering your view.  After design, measurable decreases in entropy of the state of a system must be in evidence. 

The idea that entropy - and its opposite (negentropy) information-  are not real and measurable seems to be a surprise each time we talk.  It is nonsensical to think if you start a chem reaction and exclude oxygen - that the result with have oxidized molecules.

Likewise, if you start a thing, event or process and exclude order and mutual information - that you will get results that are more organized then when you started is just as ridiculous, in terms of quantifiable science.

You are confused about what I don't understand about your posts. I don't understand why your claims about information require a mind. Fls appears to be asking the same question.

~~ Paul

I was trying to say that the problem-solving of organisms with their environments are encoded as the natural language of living things.  Each and every bio-chemical "accident" had to be encoded to keep it useful and functional.  

You appear to be using a definition of design that requires a mind. In that case, there is no design in evolution.

~~ Paul

You are confused about what I don't understand about your posts. I don't understand why your claims about information require a mind. Fls appears to be asking the same question.

~~ Paul

Information doesn't require minds.  Minds require real-world based information to transform into meaning behavior, like lungs require air to get the meaningful O2.

You have - as usual ducked the question of logic gates.  Let's close it off with modern science.

 The team realized that they were simply altering an already-existing biological logic. “Organisms must process information encoded via developmental and environmental signals to survive and reproduce,” they said (emphasis added). They recognized, further, that their operations are trivial compared to what living organisms do. “Researchers have also engineered synthetic genetic logic to realize simpler, independent control of biological processes.”
In the same issue of Science, Yaakov Benenson, from the Swiss Institute of Technology, agreed that living organisms use recombinatorial logic...

https://evolutionnews.org/2013/05/bacteria_perfor/

 This work proposes a Markovian memoryless model for the DNA that simplifies enormously the complexity of it. We encode nucleotide sequences into symbolic sequences, called words, from which we establish meaningful length of words and groups of words that share symbolic similarities. Interpreting a node to represent a group of similar words and edges to represent their functional connectivity allows us to construct a network of the grammatical rules governing the appearance of groups of words in the DNA. Our model allows us to predict the transition between groups of words in the DNA with unprecedented accuracy, and to easily calculate many informational quantities to better characterize the DNA. In addition, we reduce the DNA of known bacteria to a network of only tens of nodes, show how our model can be used to detect similar (or dissimilar) genes in different organisms, and which sequences of symbols are responsible for most of the information content of the DNA. Therefore, the DNA can indeed be treated as a language, a Markovian language, where a ‘word’ is an element of a group, and its grammar represents the rules behind the probability of transitions between any two groups.

Natural language analysis has been a topic of interest in the last decade [3–5]. Natural language written texts can be considered as being composed of a series of letters, syllables, words or phrases. During the nineteenth century, many linguists like Schleicher and Haeckel interpreted language as a living system [6]. Based on this concept, Darwin also proposed that evolution of species and language are similar [7]. Many researchers have introduced the concept of linguistics into biology [8]. Brendel et al. [9] used formal linguistic concepts to define a basic grammar for genes, based on the idea that mutating a piece of genetic information was similar to modifying words. Similar to works that aimed at finding the relevant words, their relationships and their information content in natural languages, many studies have focused on analysing genomic sequences like DNA and proteins as if they were a language, using similar methodological approaches as the one used to model natural languages [8]. Formal linguistic concepts were used by Brendel et al. [9] to define basic grammatical rules that describe how genes can mutate, inspired in the grammatical rules of languages that regulate how and which word follows a previous word. Gramatikoff et al. [10] have used lexical statistics to identify and represent structural, functional and evolutionary relationships for multiple genomic sequences and texts from natural languages. 

http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/c...3/1/150527

You appear to be using a definition of design that requires a mind. In that case, there is no design in evolution.

~~ Paul

Of course I am, because that is how mind and design are defined.  

This kinda like arguing with a flat-earther.  You are just sure that you will fall off the edge, if information processing by the mind, is real.  And project that on the rest of the world, that they should not "go there".

Darwin believed in Mental Evolution (He wrote an introduction to a book of that name authored by his student G. Romanes.)

Information doesn't require minds.  Minds require real-world based information to transform into meaning behavior, like lungs require air to get the meaningful O2.

What does that have to do with evolution?

You have - as usual ducked the question of logic gates.  Let's close it off with modern science.

Of course logic gates were designed.

I still don't understand what any of this has to do with evolution. Any chance you could succinctly state your case?

~~ Paul

Of course I am, because that is how mind and design are defined.

Fine, so there is no design in evolution.

This kinda like arguing with a flat-earther.  You are just sure that you will fall off the edge, if information processing by the mind, is real.  And project that on the rest of the world, that they should not "go there".

Of course our minds process information. You would help your case a whole lot more if you would stop insulting people and make a succinct claim. You use terms in fuzzy ways that make it difficult to understand your point. If you continue to insist the problem is that I'm stupid, then why would I care to engage you?

Darwin believed in Mental Evolution (He wrote an introduction to a book of that name authored by his student G. Romanes.)

What the hell is mental evolution?

Edited to add: Oh, this book:

https://smile.amazon.com/Mental-Evolutio...+evolution

~~ Paul

Of course our minds process information. You would help your case a whole lot more if you would stop insulting people and make a succinct claim. You use terms in fuzzy ways that make it difficult to understand your point. If you continue to insist the problem is that I'm stupid, then why would I care to engage you?

What the hell is mental evolution?

~~ Paul

Seeing the earth as flat is a literal interpretation of how reality presents itself.  It was not meant to insult, but to challenge your high-handed rebuttal.

This is a thread about Darwin and a modern view of evolution.  Darwin believed in the evolution of mental capabilities.  If you don't want to know what Darwin actually wrote as his theory of evolution -OK - but I don't have to accept that people "know" all about evolution - but reject the works of Charles D.  You can tell me what you think the ToE is  - and what Darwin meant - but I willing to do the work to post what Darwin and others actually wrote.

 Thus, apart from his immediate family, during the last eight years of Darwin’s life (1809-1882) it is likely that no one had more opportunity to discuss evolution with him than Romanes (1848-1894). Indeed, with permission, his mentor’s unpublished manuscripts on brain evolution were incorporated by Romanes into a major work – Mental Evolution in Animals (Romanes, 1884; Stauffer, 1975: 463-527). In 1886 The Times of London hailed Romanes as ‘the biological investigator upon whom the mantle of Darwin has most conspicuously descended’ (Forsdyke, 2001: 220-222).

 In his 1838 Notebook M Charles Darwin wrote likewise: ‘Now if memory of a tune and words can thus lie dormant, during a whole life time, quite unconsciously of it, surely memory from one generation to another, also without consciousness, as instincts are, is not so very wonderful’ (Barrett et al., 1987: 521). In modern terminology, our minds do not begin as ‘blank slates.’ Some specific ‘softwares’ come ‘factory-installed.’ 

Darwin wrote extensively on instinct and saw it as heritable.  You can think to your self " instincts must be a chemical in the brain" - but science looks at them as information.

 Romanes (1882: 881-882) had distinguished two processes, those ‘taking place in a something which is without extension or physical properties of any kind, and the other taking place in a something which … we recognize as having extension and other antithetical properties which we together class as physical.’ Likewise, Williams (1997: 164-166) categorized three distinct ‘domains’ for processes: the material, the informational (‘codical’), and the mental. A segment of DNA was in the material domain. The abstract potentially immortal gene that it might convey was in the informational domain. The mental domain was, somehow, separate from these.

If someone wants to talk about Darwinian evolution - then the ideas of Darwin are the only direct source.  The ideas of Darwin are compatible (in my humble opinion) with modern theory.

I understand that it is a true paradigm shift to reject a worldview, which was the framework for thinking about evolution.  But the direct line of scientific thought - from Darwin and Romanes - to today's study of biosemiosis sees evolution as being greatly influenced by focused mental work on ambient information from the environment.