re: homeostasis

~~John Wilkes Booth~~ · 05-21-2015, 08:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore

Yes. I realize it might seem a minor point, but the philosophical distinction is important, I think.

yea, no doubt there is an important philosophical distinction to be made between a premeditated purpose and an emergent function

but i think in either case, the statement "x exists for y"

or in this case specifically "humans/organisms exist to reproduce/propagate genes" is still accurate

you really don't need for the propagation of genes to be a premeditated goal with regard to the 'design' of humans in order to make this statement true. because even in the alternative scenario... where humans exist as a consequence of the laws of natural selection... because for whatever reason it was statistically favorable for genes to be hosted by an organism, and this organism was shaped and modified over time by natural selection for fitness... the statement that humans exist to propagate these genes is still true, objectively speaking.

because if the laws of nature didn't give rise to this natural competition between replicating molecules which lead to the development of organisms as a way to host and spread these molecules, humans literally wouldn't exist. so i don't think you need an intelligent designer to say that organisms do have an objective purpose, with regard to the trends produced by natural law.

Guybrush · 05-26-2015, 01:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DwnWthVwls

Natural selection doesn't select for anything specifically, I'm confused why you're making it sound like something deliberate.

Yes, I agree. The word selection in biological lingo dates back to Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (which has evolved into the modern theory of evolution). Darwin's convincing argument was that nature acts like a breeder and a breeder will select some traits over others. Ex. only the grey bunnies will get to reproduce and the brown ones will be killed (or "culled" as a breeder might say). Darwin's argument was of course that nature also selects, only not deliberately.

So basically the word "select" and "selection" is firmly embedded in the history and culture of modern biology, but I agree that it can be misleading.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DwnWthVwls

Can you expand a bit on what you mean when you say fitness?

Expanding on fitness is a little difficult because I am not quite sure how much you know about it already. As a subject, it can be relatively simple or it can be fairly huge. I'll try to be brief and then invite you to ask if there's more I can help clarify.

Fitness, as I have used it, is a vague term that describes how capable an organism is at passing on its genes to the next generations - so basically how well it can preserve its own genes into the future. For example, the more children an organism has, the higher fitness it generally has. Possibly, those children would die without proper care, so then the organism can also raise its own fitness by caring for its young so that they in turn will survive long enough to pass on their genes, etc.

Basically, most things an organism does will affect its fitness. Every time it gains or loses a resource or it hurts itself or escapes a predator (etc), that can be calculated to have an effect on fitness (if miniscule). Thus, fitness itself becomes a very unspecific term that will apply to various strategies that exist for passing on genes. Natural selection will generally select for traits and strategies that maximize fitness, however this is achieved.

(As a side note, many say that organisms like humans live to reproduce, but that's inaccurate. Sexual reproduction just happens to be a good fitness maximizing strategy for many animals, but not for all. The worker bees I mentioned earlier leave the sexual reproduction to their queen.)

Fitness as a concept is made a little more complicated in that it doesn't actually apply specifically to organisms, even though we use it that way. Rather, it applies to the organism's genetic material and this is shared with other organisms like family. Hence, we say an organism can maximize "its" fitness by f.ex making sure its children survive to reproduce, but what we're really talking about is the fitness of these genes that go on existing across a series of organisms whose lineage stretches through the pants of time.

As an epilogue, when I write that "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" is a good strategy for maximizing fitness, it means that two individuals can work together so that they are both more capable at passing on their genes to the next generations. If they're closely related, it becomes even better, because some of those genes that each helped the other pass on will be the same genes that each also possess.

The Batlord · 05-26-2015, 02:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore

Fitness as a concept is made a little more complicated in that it doesn't actually apply specifically to organisms, even though we use it that way. Rather, it applies to the organism's genetic material and this is shared with other organisms like family. Hence, we say an organism can maximize "its" fitness by f.ex making sure its children survive to reproduce, but what we're really talking about is the fitness of these genes that go on existing across a series of organisms whose lineage stretches through the pants of time.

Is that a thing, or a typo?

Guybrush · 05-26-2015, 02:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xurtio

"Then you might say what about orphans or donating people to the sick and hungry? Then I'd say, as has been mentioned before, we evolved during a time when there were no orphanages or infomercials about starving people far away. The people around you were probably closely related to you and people whom your very existence depended on in a big way. When your genes look at a person who is in a bad place, their kneejerk reaction is probably that this person is a part of that group of people in which you have an "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" sort of relationship with. Modern society or parts of it haven't been around long enough for us to be adapted to it in a real fitness-calculating way"

Which, I believe, would make it an exaption if that were the case. I don't see how what you're saying conflicts with my point.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. My point is that altruism between humans owes some or much of its existence to the fact that we live in an environment that we are not adapted to. That means that even though our genes want to help starving people in far away countries, they are "motivated" to do so by selfishness.

Selfless, altruistic strategies may exist, but they're not here because they are adaptive and promoted through natural selection. As you say, every individual reproducing can be detrimental to a population because it exhausts resource - and this is exactly how populations behave. Those who can reproduce do so and population growth can spiral out of control, exhausting resources, causing populations to starve, crash and perhaps even go extinct. This is how organisms generally behave.

I'm sorry if I'm arguing against a strawman.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xurtio

You and I have a different paradigm too. You talk about traits being specifically selected for and serving functions. If you consider the other half, environment (where selection happens) the genes are more of a library and the "higher order" system (gene regulatory systems that decide what genes are expressed and when and for how long) are really the place to look at where the biological system is interpreting and responding to its environment using its library of genes. In this paradigm, there are no "gay genes" or "altruistic genes" that selected for, there's versatile genes that can be expressed to varying degree in a population and can serve to diversify social function In an dynamic manner - how humans deine and pick out thesee functions causes some loss of generality (we're forced to map territories we haven't been to, to talk about the ones we have). Of course, genetic variety will also contribute to social roles, but this broader reach of altruism over longer distances of relatedness has left a lot of people "artificially selected" (if you consider human selection non-natural... kind of getting into confusing the map with the territory at that point though). And I do think there's lots of evidence in the nature of our facial processing structures in our brain (which are distinct from other visual processing structures) and cooperation between tribes provided a benefit in many cases (knowing when to cooperate and when to compete is the superior trait, so an adaptive library would be more fit than a fixed library).

I'm on my phone so forgive the formatting and penmanship ship.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xurtio

"And I do think there's lots of evidence in the nature of our facial processing structures in our brain (which are distinct from other visual processing structures)"

I double checked this because its been a while since I saw the article. Apparently, this research has been challenged, so the issue is more controversial than my assertion alludes to.

I don't really understand the bigger picture you're presenting here and so am unsure of how to respond to it. But in general terms, if your genes only exist to promote those other genes in the library, then they will go extinct. Hence, all genes have to work for their own survival. Hence, genes are selfish.

Guybrush · 05-26-2015, 03:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth

yea, no doubt there is an important philosophical distinction to be made between a premeditated purpose and an emergent function

but i think in either case, the statement "x exists for y"

or in this case specifically "humans/organisms exist to reproduce/propagate genes" is still accurate

you really don't need for the propagation of genes to be a premeditated goal with regard to the 'design' of humans in order to make this statement true. because even in the alternative scenario... where humans exist as a consequence of the laws of natural selection... because for whatever reason it was statistically favorable for genes to be hosted by an organism, and this organism was shaped and modified over time by natural selection for fitness... the statement that humans exist to propagate these genes is still true, objectively speaking.

because if the laws of nature didn't give rise to this natural competition between replicating molecules which lead to the development of organisms as a way to host and spread these molecules, humans literally wouldn't exist. so i don't think you need an intelligent designer to say that organisms do have an objective purpose, with regard to the trends produced by natural law.

I don't think I understand your argument.

I might compare nature to a board with differently shaped holes in it and then compare organisms to pegs with different shapes. Some of these pegs will slip through the holes while others won't. Noone designed the board with any purpose, it just came to be through a process of cause and consequence. The same could be said for the organisms (pegs). Could you then say that the objective for a peg is to be shaped so that it slips through a hole in the board?

Guybrush · 05-26-2015, 03:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Batlord

Is that a thing, or a typo?

The trousers of time is a common metaphor in Terry Pratchett's writings

He operates with a multiverse where every possible outcome happens in some universe (so for infinite possibilities, there are infinite universes and infinite Batlords). So the pants or trousers of time actually represents a point in which one universe diverges into two paralell universes, typically because a character makes an important decision.

I don't subscribe to this personally, but I like to reference the late Mr. Pratchett.

The Batlord · 05-26-2015, 03:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore

The trousers of time is a common metaphor in Terry Pratchett's writings

He operates with a multiverse where every possible outcome happens in some universe (so for infinite possibilities, there are infinite universes and infinite Batlords). So the pants or trousers of time actually represents a point in which two parallell universes diverge into two, typically because a character makes an important decision.

I don't subscribe to this personally, but I like to reference the late Mr. Pratchett.

Truly, existence is a wondrous thing.

DwnWthVwls · 05-26-2015, 07:16 AM

Thanks for the clarifications. I'm gonna have to go back and reread some of this convo, it's been quite for sometime, and I don't even remember what the back and fourth was about.

Xurtio · 05-26-2015, 10:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore

I'm not sure what you mean by this. My point is that altruism between humans owes some or much of its existence to the fact that we live in an environment that we are not adapted to. That means that even though our genes want to help starving people in far away countries, they are "motivated" to do so by selfishness.

Selfless, altruistic strategies may exist, but they're not here because they are adaptive and promoted through natural selection. As you say, every individual reproducing can be detrimental to a population because it exhausts resource - and this is exactly how populations behave. Those who can reproduce do so and population growth can spiral out of control, exhausting resources, causing populations to starve, crash and perhaps even go extinct. This is how organisms generally behave.

I'm sorry if I'm arguing against a strawman.

I don't really understand the bigger picture you're presenting here and so am unsure of how to respond to it. But in general terms, if your genes only exist to promote those other genes in the library, then they will go extinct. Hence, all genes have to work for their own survival. Hence, genes are selfish.

I think we agree here honestly, and the differences are semantic. You are talking about genes actually being selfish, but I am saying that psychologically, the urge is selfless (no personal gain is perceived by the organism even though they have a genetic incentive for altruism).

And that this altruism that evolved in a tribal setting (where, genetically, it was not altruism proper, in your terminology) translated to a farther reaching altruism in post-agriculture societies and now serves as a selection process itself that selects more on ideology than fitness. This meme (altruism/equality/socialism) is in competition with more competitive models (like capitalism and social darwinism) and both ideologies heavily influence who lives and dies before reproducing (and this influence selection) And exist at different levels in our social structures (from politicians to riff raff). I have to concede that it could end up just a noise term, but I feel like genocide and nation wars would have a strong effect on which gene lines remain.

It would be awesome to time jump 50,000 years ahead and see how humans evolve in such an artificially self-constructed environment (If it's even sustainable; iirc we follow the same population/extinction curve as other mammals leading some to speculate, based on population dynamics, that our time may be coming soon, as we appear to be reaching the peak).

Guybrush · 05-26-2015, 03:31 PM

Indeed Xurtio

I agree with what you write.

I might add, perhaps darkly, that I too think we're following the typical population growth followed by a depletion of resources and rapid population decline / crash curve.

05-26-2015, 03:31 PM	#90 (permalink)
Guybrush Juicious Maximus III Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: Scabb Island Posts: 6,525	Indeed Xurtio I agree with what you write. I might add, perhaps darkly, that I too think we're following the typical population growth followed by a depletion of resources and rapid population decline / crash curve. __________________ Something Completely Different