Increasing complexity in evolution
Over the history of life there have been many occasions in which new complex systems developed from earlier, simpler ones, leading to explosion in diversity as the new system fills niches that it can exploit better than the old. Some examples are the formation of the first prokaryotic cells from looser collections of genes and membranes, the origin of eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic ancestors, the development of sexual reproduction, the origin of multicellular animals and plants, and the appearance of animal colonies or societies and of complex symbiotic relations.
There are two main types of such complexity transitions, which can be labelled "egalitarian" and "fraternal".
Egalitarian transitions involve the union and cooperation of entities with different origins and abilities. Examples are the combination of self-replicating genes into the coherent genomes of the earliest cells; bacteria and archaea coming together to form eukaryotic cells with mitochondria and sometimes chloroplasts; the origin of societies with non-kin members; mutualist symbiosis between different species, as in lichens; and possibly the union of partners in sexual reproduction.
The defining trait of an egalitarian transition is that the different units are genetically diverse, and therefore must all reproduce on their own: if they didn't all pass on their genes, they wouldn't stay part of the relationship. Even today, in our cells, mitochondria replicate independently of the nucleus. That also means the different units are in competition with each other.
Sure, in the long term cooperation may be best for all: the main driver of egalitarian transitions is cooperation between elements with different "skills", such as the photosynthesis of algae and the talent for nutrient mining of fungi in lichens. But evolution doesn't really do "long term". If an element can replicate itself more by mooching off the others, the mooching variant will become more numerous than the self-effacing variant.
Therefore, the way these transitions occur is by enforcing mutual dependence, for example by enclosure and by synchronized reproduction. When proto-genes were first enclosed by proto-membranes to form proto-cells, they were all in the same boat: any cheater mutant would quickly destroy itself by destroying its own sustainance. Parasites often become beneficial symbionts when they cannot easily jump to a new host, and viruses may become less deadly over time.
The interdependence can be enforced further by exchanging genes: mitochondria and chloroplasts turned over many essential genes to the nucleus of their host cell, and though they can reproduce on their own, they cannot survive for long. Also, mitochondria are only ever passed by the mother's eggs, not by the father's sperm, preventing the zygote from becoming a battleground (in algae, mitochondria always come from one parent, and chloroplasts from the other).
When all goes well, the result of an egalitarian transition is a cell or a society, or a small ecosystem built from cooperating interdependent parts that function as a whole.
In fraternal transitions, in contrast, the units all share the same origin and nature. Examples are the evolution of clonal colonies (e.g. of trees or coral polyps), eusocial colonies (think ants, bees, or naked mole rats), and the origin of animals, plants, and fungi with multicellular bodies. The main benefit here is not complementary skills, but economy of scale: when mole rats dig for tubers, they gain more by sharing the rare but abundant finds than by each digging on their own (and going hungry most of the time).
One major difference from the other type is that all the members of the greater unit are genetically identical, or nearly so: therefore, they do not all need to reproduce (from the POV of my genes, it makes no difference at all whether I or my identical twin have children: any gene I have, they will pass on just as well). Indeed, the disposability of most elements is a selling point of this kind of transition.
But you know who cannot say the same? Cheater mutants -- cancer, if you will. Any cancerous mutation, by virtue of being new, cannot count on being transmitted by other units, and benefits from replicating itself on expense of other genes. The uniform terrain will give it plenty of fertile soil.
An excellent way to put a stop to that is to limit reproduction to few units: think of the egg and sperm cells of animals, or ant queens. First of all, these segregated reproductive units can be kept in conditions that favor a low mutation rate, for example slow metabolism and protection from light. Most importantly, they put a bottleneck through which all mutations must pass: if a cancerous mutation occurs in (say) digestive tissue, that's regrettable, but it won't be passed down to the offspring; but if it happens in the germinal line, well, the new offspring will be entirely composed of cancerous cells, and the bad mutation once again destroys itself. Reproductive segregation resets genetic uniformity in each generation.
Genetic uniformity does not mean morphological or functional uniformity: thanks to contextual gene activation, the cells in your brain, bones, liver, and heart all have the exact same genes, but very different structures and functions. When all goes well, fraternal transitions may end with the constituent units specializing for different functions, taking on some of the advantage of the egalitarian transition, while still keeping genetic diversity as low as possible.
And that's how you go from bacteria to humanity, more or less.
42 notes
·
View notes
You have to assume books like The 48 Laws of Power might be lying to you. Especially if you're tempted take them seriously as wisdom to live by.
Within the first couple pages of The 48 Laws of Power, the author
states in absolute and certain terms that genuinely honest people who aren't playing power games don't exist, and
talks up deception, playing with appearances, and wearing many faces, not just as essential skill, but as beautiful and pleasurable.
So the author just told you anything in their book might be manipulation or dishonesty, and you cannot naively weave what the book says into the premises from which you think.
You are left, as always, with just the inevitable forces of game theoretic incentives and natural selection pressures as guidance. What benefits could the author have gotten from writing such a book? What goals of his might it have served?
The author sounds like someone who would be acutely concerned about the risk that power gain might be a "zero sum game" - where you can only win at others' expense, which might mean at their expense.
So ask yourself - why would someone with that perspective and lots of real power share true power with you, a random stranger who paid them little, or with a publishing house before that? Unfiltered and undistorted wisdom which is actually maximally effective is literally one of the most potent weapons in that game. It's not impossible, but why is it relative nobodies who write books like this?
Machiavelli's famous now only because we have forgotten his station - he wrote the book on machiavellianism, yes, but he wrote it as an open audition for that sweet gig where some noble gives you patronage money. He was not powerful, he was a wannabe pet Creative Guy trying to find a sugar daddy. So too, we must assume, might be the case for modern writers.
So what's more likely? The author of The 48 Laws of Power figured out
..great wisdom for gaining power. OR
..a great way to get money from people who'd turn to a book for power.
At best, any winning wisdom you can trust from such books is extracted at great expense by trying to come up with
every possible way the author might be lying, misleading, or omitting, and
every possible true wisdom motivating each of those lies, distortions, or omissions, then
every incentive or pressure for each of those possibilities, and finally
which of those is most likely.
At worst (or at best, depending on which side of the evolutionary arms race between honest mutualism and manipulative selfishness you are), these books are traps - a way for the honest mutualists to get the manipulative selfish to waste their time and money, and perhaps even expose themselves to the other side.
10 notes
·
View notes
By: Richard Dawkins
Published: Nov 13, 2023
“I say, Jarvis, cluster round.”
“Sir?”
“Close on me – if that’s the right expression?”
“A military phrase, sir, employed by officers requiring the presence of their subordinates.”
“Right, Jarvis. Lend me your ears.”
“Equally appropriate, sir. Mark Antony . . .”
“Never mind Mark Antony, Jarvis. This is important.”
“Very good sir.”
“As you know, Jarvis, when it comes to regions north of the collar stud, B Woofter is not rated highly in the form book. Nevertheless, I do have one great scholastic triumph to my credit. And I bet you don’t know what that was?”
“You have frequently adverted to it sir. You won the prize for Scripture Knowledge at your preparatory academy.”
“Yes, Jarvis, I did, to the ill-concealed surprise of the Rev Aubrey Upcock, proprietor and chief screw at that infamous hell-hole. And ever since then, although not much of a lad for Matins or Evensong, I’ve always had a soft spot for Holy Writ as we experts call it. And now we come to the nub. Orcrux, Jarvis?”
“Very appropriate sir, or ‘nitty gritty’ is these days often heard.”
“The point is, Jarvis, as an aficionado, I have long been especially fond of the book of Genesis. God made the world in six days, am I right, Jarvis?”
“Well sir . . .”
“Beginning with light, God moved swiftly through the gears, making plants and things that creep, scaly things with fins, our feathered friends tootling through the trees, furry brothers and sisters in the undergrowth and finally, rounding into the straight, he created chaps like us, before taking to his hammock for a well-earned siesta on the seventh day. Am I right, Jarvis?”
“Yes sir, if I may say so, a colourfully mixed summary of one of our great origin myths.”
“But now, Jarvis, mark the sequel. A fellow at the Dregs Christmas party was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation . . .”
“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859, On the Origin of Species.”
“That’s the baby, Jarvis. Evolution. Would you credit it, this Darwin bozo wants me to believe my great great grandfather was some kind of hirsute banana-stuffer, scratching himself with his toes and swinging through the treetops. Now, Jarvis, answer me this. If we’re descended from chimpanzees, why are there chimpanzees still among those present and correct? I saw one only last month at the zoo. Why haven’t they all turned into members of the Dregs Club (or the Athenaeum according to taste)? Try that on your pianola, Jarvis.”
“If I might take the liberty, sir, you appear to be labouring under a misunderstanding. Mr Darwin does not say that we are descended from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and we are descended from a shared ancestor. Chimpanzees are modern apes, which have been evolving since the time of the shared ancestor, just as we have.”
“Hm, well I think I get your drift, Jarvis. Just as my pestilential cousin Thomas and I are both descended from the same grandfather. But neither of us looks any more like the old reprobate than the other, and neither of us has his side-whiskers.”
“Precisely sir.”
“But hang on, Jarvis. We old lags of the Scripture Knowledge handicap don’t give up that easily. My old man’s guvnor may have been a hairy old gargoyle, but he wasn’t what you’d call a chimpanzee. I distinctly remember. Far from dragging his knuckles over the ground, he carried himself with an upright, military bearing (at least until his later years, and when the port had gone round a few times). And the family portraits in the old ancestral home, Jarvis. We Woofters did our bit at Agincourt, and there were no apes on the strength during that “God for Harry, England and St George” carry-on.”
“I think, sir, you underestimate the time spans involved. Only a few centuries have passed since Agincourt. Our shared ancestor with chimpanzees lived more than five million years ago. If I might venture upon a flight of fancy sir?”
“Certainly you might, Jarvis. Venture away, with the young master’s blessing”
“Suppose you walk back in time one mile, sir, to reach the Battle of Agincourt . . .”
“Sort of like walking from here to the Dregs, Jarvis?”
“Yes sir. On the same scale, to walk back to the ancestor we share with chimpanzees, you’d have to walk all the way from London to Australia.”
“Goodness, Jarvis, all the way to the land of cobbers with corks dangling from their lids. No wonder there are no apes among the family portraits, no low-browed chest-thumpers to be seen once-more-unto-the-breaching at Agincourt.”
“Indeed sir, and to go back to our shared ancestor with fish . . .”
“Wait a minute, Jarvis, hold it there. Are you now telling me I’m descended from something that would feel at home on a slab?”
“We share ancestors with modern fish, sir, which would certainly have been called fish if we could see them. You could safely say that we are descended from fish, sir.”
“Jarvis, sometimes you go too far. Although, when I think of Gussie Hake-Wortle . . .”
“I would not have ventured to make the comparison myself sir. But if I might pursue my fanciful perambulation back through time, sir? To reach the ancestor that we share with our piscine cousins . . .”
“Let me guess, Jarvis, you’d have to walk right round the whole bally globe and come back to where you started and surprise yourself from behind?”
“A considerable underestimate sir. You’d have to walk to the moon and back, and then set off and do the whole journey again sir.”
“Jarvis, this is too much to spring on a lad with a morning head. Go and mix me one of those pick-me-ups of yours before I can take any more.”
“I have one in readiness sir, prepared when I perceived the lateness of the hour of your return from your club last night.”
“Attaboy, Jarvis. But wait, here’s another thing. This Darwin bird says it all happened by chance. Like spinning the big wheel at Le Touquet. Or like when Bufty Snodgrass scored a hole in one and stood drinks for the whole club for a week.”
“No sir that is incorrect. Natural selection is not a matter of chance. Mutation is a chance process. Natural selection is not.”
“Take a run-up and bowl that one by me again, Jarvis, if you wouldn’t mind. And this time make it your slower ball, with no spin. What is mutation?”
“I beg your pardon sir, I presumed too much. From the Latin mutatio, feminine, ‘a change’, a mutation is a mistake in the copying of a gene.”
“Like a misprint in a book, Jarvis?”
“Yes sir, and, like a misprint in a book, a mutation is not likely to lead to improvement. Just occasionally, however, it does, and then it is more likely to survive and be passed on in consequence. That would be natural selection. Mutation, sir, is random in that it has no bias towards improvement. Selection, by contrast, is automatically biased towards improvement, where improvement means ability to survive. One could almost coin a phrase, sir, and say ‘Mutation proposes, selection disposes.’
“Rather neat that, Jarvis. Your own?”
“No sir, the pleasantry is an anonymous parody of Thomas à Kempis.”
“So, Jarvis, let me see if I’ve got a firm grip on the trouser seat of this problem. We see something that looks like a piece of natty design, like an eye or a heart, and we wonder how it bally well got here.”
“Yes sir.”
“It can’t have got here by pure chance because that would be like Bufty’s hole in one, when we had drinks all round for a week.”
“In some respects it would be even more improbable than the Honourable Mr Snodgrass’s alcoholically celebrated feat with the driver, sir. For all the parts of a human body to come together by sheer chance would be about as improbable as a hole in one if Mr Snodgrass were blindfolded and spun around, so that he had no idea of the whereabouts of the ball on the tee, nor of the direction of the green. Were he to be permitted a single stroke with a wood, sir, his chance of scoring a hole in one would be about as great as the chance of a human body spontaneously coming together if all its parts were shuffled at random.”
“What if Bufty had had a few drinks beforehand, Jarvis? Which, by the way, is pretty likely.”
“The contingency of a hole in one is sufficiently remote, sir, and the calculation sufficiently approximate, that we may neglect the possible effects of alcoholic stimulants. The angle subtended at the tee by the hole . . .”
“That’ll do, Jarvis, remember I have a headache. What I clearly see through the fog is that random chance is a non-starter, a washout, scratched at the off. So how do we get complex things that work, like human bodies?”
“To answer that question, sir, was Mr Darwin’s great achievement. Evolution happens gradually and over a very long time. Each generation is imperceptibly different from the previous one, and the degree of improbability required in any one generation is not prohibitive. But after a sufficiently large number of millions of generations, the end product can be very improbable indeed, and can look very much as though it was designed.”
“But it only looks like the work of some slide-rule toting whizz with a drawing board and a row of biros in his top pocket?”
“Yes sir, the illusion of design results from the accumulation of a large number of small improvements in the same direction, each one small enough to result from a single mutation, but the whole cumulative sequence is prolonged enough to culminate in an end result that could not have come about in a single chance event. The metaphor has been advanced of a slow climb up the gentle slopes of what has somewhat over-dramatically been called ‘Mount Improbable’, sir.”
“Jarvis, that’s a doozra of an idea, and I think I’m beginning to get my eye in for it. But I wasn’t too far wrong, was I, when I called it ‘evaluation’ instead of evolution?”
“No sir. The process somewhat resembles the breeding of racehorses. The fastest horses are evaluated by breeders and the best ones are chosen as progenitors of future generations. Mr Darwin realised that in nature the same principle works without the need for any breeder to do the evaluating. The individuals that run fastest are automatically less likely to be caught by lions.”
“Or tigers, Jarvis. Tigers are very fast, Inky Brahmapur was telling me at the Dregs only last week.”
“Yes sir, tigers too. I can well imagine that his Highness would have had ample opportunity to observe their speed from the back of his elephant. The nub, or crux, is that the fastest individual horses survive to breed and pass on the genes that made them fast, because they are less likely to be eaten by large predators.
“By Jove, Jarvis, that makes a lot of sense. And I suppose the fastest tigers also get to breed because they are the first ones to grab their medium rare with all the trimmings, and so survive to have little tigers that also grow up to be fast.”
“Yes sir.”
“But this is amazing, Jarvis. This really prangs the triple twenty. And the same thing works not just for horses and tigers but for everything else?”
“Precisely sir.”
“But Jarvis, wait a moment. I can see that this bowls Genesis middle stump. But where does it leave God? It sounds from what this Darwin bimbo says, that there’s not a lot left for God to do. I mean to say, Jarvis, I know what it’s like to be underemployed, and underemployed is what God, if you get my drift, would seem to be.”
“Very true sir.”
“So, well, dash it, I mean to say, Jarvis, in that case why do we even believe in God at all?”
“Why indeed sir?”
“Jarvis, this is astounding. Incredulous.”
“Incredible sir.”
“Yes, incredible, Jarvis. I shall see the world through new eyes, no longer through a glass darkly as we biblical scholars say. Don’t bother with that pick-me-up, Jarvis. I find I no longer need it. I feel sort of liberated. Instead, bring me my hat, my stick, and the binoculars Aunt Daphne gave me last Goodwood. I’m going out into the park to admire the trees, the butterflies, the birds and the squirrels, and marvel at everything you have told me. You don’t mind if I do a spot of marvelling at everything you’ve told me, Jarvis?”
“No indeed sir. Marvelling is very much in the proper vein, and other gentlemen have told me that they experience the same sense of liberation on first comprehending such matters. If I might make a further suggestion sir?”
“Suggest away, Jarvis, suggest away, we are always ready to hear suggestions from you.”
“Well sir, if you would care to follow the matter further, I have a small volume here, which you might care to peruse.”
“Doesn’t look very small to me, Jarvis, but anyway, what is it called?”
“It is called The Greatest Show on Earth, sir, and it is by . . .”
“It doesn’t matter who it’s by, Jarvis, any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Heave it over and I’ll have a look when I return. Now, the binoculars, the stick and the gents’ bespoke headwear if you please. I have some intensive marvelling to do.”
==
Note: "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" is by Richard Dawkins. It's a little self-referential, tongue-in-cheek joke.
11 notes
·
View notes