In scientific investigations . . . it is permitted to invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts, it rises to the rank of a well grounded theory. Charles Darwin (1875): The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
One of our greatest needs is security. We want things to work, to be reliable, to be free of unpleasant surprises. One of my old cars used to stop unexpectedly at the worst of times, sometimes in the middle of city traffic. What do do? Put the hazard lights on and use the last power in the battery to wind my way to a safe place. Or push. Once I broke my achilles tendon doing just this. This led to pain, surgery, plaster and crutches that dug into my armpits, three months of disability during which I was not game to stand on my toes or dance lest it break again.
Fortunately I live in a world of money, taxis, hospitals and free health care. I was able to continue working at home. What would it have been like if I had been poor, friendless, a refugee, perhaps hunted and homeless? Things could always have been worse. I was saved because I had backup provided by my own resources and the relatively comprehensive welfare state in which I life.
When I was younger I was a believing Catholic who understood that my life was governed by an omniscient and omnipotent God. Not only did this god see everything I did and read my mind (thus seeing all my sinful "dirty thoughts", but they governed every possible and actual event in the whole universe. Since this God is considered to be benevolent toward humans, we were taught that all the evils that we encountered were in fact designed by the almighty for our greater good so that we had no claim against God for mistreating us. The Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews 4:12-13, Aquinas, Summa I, 14, 14: Does God know enunciabe things?, Aquinas, Summa, I, 22, 3: Does God have immediate providence over everything?
From a modern mathematical and scientific point of view, it is impossible for any consistent entity as complex as arithmetic to have have complete deterministic control over itself. This matter is discussed at length on Cognitive Cosmology page 5: God's ideas, cybernetics and singularity. The divine universe discussed on that site incorporate uncertainty, as quantum theory demonstrates. Laplace's Demon is self-contradictory and so cannot exist. Laplace's demon - Wikipedia
Reproduction is a form of chain reaction, and is capable of growing exponentially. Since each newborn individual requires resources to live, and the resources of Earth are finite, unbounded reproduction will eventually be halted by famine, overcrowding, pollution or some other constraint. In such a situation, not all the offspring can survive and there will be a selective process which will favour those better able acquire the resources for life. Malthusianism - Wikipedia
Charles Darwin knew that centuries of selective breeding had created a wide variety of domesticated animals and plants. He imagined that natural selection could do the same in the wild world. In the domestic realm the breeder seeks to mate individuals that are tending in the desired direction with an eye to the desired end result. Charles Darwin (1859): The Origin of Species; By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for LifeIn the wild mating is rather more random, since in the wild there is often room for choice by the participants themselves. In a divine world, natural selection is effectively a judgement from God, and it operates at all scales from the quantum of action to the Universe as a whole. Every time I act, my action is judged. If I make a fatal error, the action will fail. A lesser error may lead to a limited result, an error which may possibly be repaired. In each case, the individual action is judged by its interaction with its environment.
Our scientific understanding of the tree of life exhibits the work of natural selection. Darwin had far less information to go on, but was able to discern the general pattern and publish it in The Origin of Species. His work stirred even greater controversy when he applied his theory in The Descent of Man. This work was understood to directly contradict the Catholic doctrine that God creates a new immortal soul for every child born. Charles Darwin (1871): The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Catholic Catechism: 366: Every spiritual soul is created immediately by God
Variation and selection enable organisms to adapt to environmental change. If the change is so fast that a species cannot keep up it will probably become extinct through failure to reproduce. Human anthropocene activity, by making swift and massive changes in the planetary environment, may have been been responsible for tens thousands of extinctions since our footprint began to explode. Anthropocene - Wikipedia, Fred Pearce: Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Widely?
In the theological language suggested here, adaptation means listening to God and acting on what we hear. We listen through the sciences that tell us how God works, and the arts that communicate these ideas to us in images, symbols and machinery.
Variation and selection apply in all environments where competition is induced by a shortage of resources. In general survivors are the ones who can gather abundant resources or learn to live with less. Creatures adapt through the slow process of genetic evolution, the faster process of the epigenetic emergence of instincts, and the fastest process, cultural development.
A deterministic system cannot be creative. Determinism means that it cannot do anything new. It just follows identical sequences of operations like a mathematically perfect computer. Darwin know that plant and animal breeders could take advantage of the fact that the offspring sexually reproducing creatures were not identical to their parents. Sexual reproduction is not a deterministic process because it involves at least mixing the genes of the parents. There is also a certain amount of error in the copying and reproduction of genes, something that was not known to Darwin or anybody else at that time. The importance of Mendel's work on the genetics of peas was recognized until 1900, 40 yaars after Darwin has written The Origin of Species. Charles Darwin (1859), Gregor Mendel - Wikipedia
Darwin saw that variation was essential to evolution. New varieties of pigeons, dogs, sheep, cattle, horses, flowers an vegetables and other species of interest were artificially selected from the variants by their breeders. Darwin realized that there could also be natural selection. Among the progeny of any mating, there would be individuals better suited to surviving and reproducing in the environment into which they were born. By detailed connection the ideas of variation and selection in many different natural populations, including ancient individuals know from paleoontology he built a comprehensive and detailed case for evolution. Darwin's evolutionary paradigm now provides a universal model for the descent and classification of all the forms that inhabit the tree of life. Tree of Life: Tree of Life Web Project
Evolution by genetic variation is a slow process. It has taken about four billion years since life began on Earth for it to get to its current state. Many of us consider that we are the high point of the evolutionary process, but this should not lead us to overlook the magnificently complex and detailed process that brought us to be. When we consider the physiology of life in in its full complex detail see that our bodies are defined and constructed in atomic detail. Composition of the human body - Wikipedia
Human cultural evolution is many thousands of times faster. Since we evolved about 300 thousand years ago we have developed many thousands of languages and cultures. In the course of about 3000 years we have gone from ancient poetic literature like the Iliad and the Hebrew Bible to modern science.
The variation that made this development possible is the intellectual power of imagination that has developed over the three million years that brought us to our current level of humanity. In the last millennium of our existence we have seen scientific revolutions occur about once every century. The most recent, quantum theory, started in 1900 and has since transformed our physical culture creating the instrumentation that has made possible a complete revision in our understanding of the universe we inhabit, and revolutionized our global communications and sharing of information through computer networks like the internet. Now approximately half the population of the world has the ability to communicate with one another for very little expense.
The evolutionary paradigm implicit in science is formally identical to the well established scientific method. The evolution of science and the evolution of species are formally identical processes. We begin with a specific environment and agents acting in that environment. The variation inherent in the actions of the agents, whether created by sexual genetic superposition of random errors in copying genes or through imagination, communication which leads to superposition of ideas and misunderstandings leading to the new interpretations of the environment scientists call hypothesis. These variations are then subject to selection. In the natural environment, this test determines filters out variant individuals which are capable of survival and reproduction, passing their variations into the future. In the scientific environment, hypotheses are confronted with carefully curated data taken from the environment and those that best fit the data are selected for publication in the literature to become subject to further hypothetical variations and further testing.
The power of evolution in all its forms at all scales lies in its recursive nature, and this recursion is reflected in both the tree of life and the history of science. like natural species, scientific ideas are created, have a natural lifetime and perhaps become extinct as their environment changes as species and hypotheses better able to survive in new environments attract the available resources to themselves. Some features of the evolutionary process, like genetic reproduction and and communication between scientists via literature and meeting remain at the heart of the process. This establishes the notion that any reasonable theory of everything must be a theory of of network communication. The implementation of this communication in the evolution scientific community provides us with a clear analogue to the cosmic network of communication that has brought the current universe to be.
This theoretical background is developed in some detail in the companion site Cognitive cosmology. That site corresponds to the first part of the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. This site corresponds to the first part of the second art of the Summa, a treatment of the forms of behaviour best suited to allow us to take advantage of the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves.Evolution explores the possibilities of survival, and the essential cybernetic feature of survival is homeostasis, the ability to keep ones internal conditions within the boundaries of survival. For a living person, the first task of doctors, paramedics and nurses treating life threatening injuries is to maintain blood volume, temperature, chemical composition and circulation so that the cells that comprise the living body have the resources to stay alive. One the conditions for continued cellular life are established the process of repairing the injuries can begin.
The same idea applies to all other questions of survival. In the public corporate world we demand that corporations be solvent, that is that they have sufficient resources to pay their just debts. For private businesses conditions are less stringent but the ability to pay debt is still fundamental. An accumulation of unpaid debt will eventually lead to action by a tax collecting authority, a debt collector or simple refusal of further credit from suppliers. A private activity with no specific connection to the financial world can continue as long as the agent can keep working. Eventually such an agent will face the same constraints an any other form of life, and die if they cannot maintain their personal security and resources for life like food and shelter.
corporate survival failure of nations maxwell governor theory PID control Lotke-Voterra entropy information is physical Society and Culture The use of sovereign power, codes of conduct, religious and cultural practices and other dynamic processes in a society can be described as a part of an evolved homeostatic system of regularizing life and maintaining an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal and external imbalances or dangers.[84][85] Healthy civic cultures can be said to have achieved an optimal homeostatic balance between multiple contradictory concerns such as in the tension between respect for individual rights and concern for the public good,[86] or that between governmental effectiveness and responsiveness to the interests of citizens. [8
We appear to be in the midst of a global loss of economic control, facing one of the periodic recessions that blight our hopes of unbroken human development.
4.1: Malthus and natural selection