A PRÉCIS
in response to which species within it's bounds are well written essays"
This 'fusiform' shape offers least resistance to the flow of water (source: Hynes, 1970).
0. Abstract
The question of 'how tomorrow's science will view the process of evolution' is a prescient one. Today, in hindsight, we can appreciate how Aristotle, Lamarck, Cuvier, Wallace and Darwin each viewed essentially the same phenomenological world about them, and yet their personal interpretation of the data differed dramatically; each building on the work of the former. Consequently, the world picture or model that their interpretation came to engender, 'the paradigm of the age', shifted and evolved in the same manner as the organisms that they each sought to explain. The general agreement is that, over time science progresses to a state of increasing completion. To rephrase our question and to ask 'how will tomorrow's more complete science have reinterpreted the evolutionary data laid before it', then, bearing in mind the real need to adhere to the familiar and the known, yet also bearing in mind the hierarchical nature of knowledge, the inevitability of sweeping, radical insights to come hits a somewhat illiberal nail squarely on the head. Although we cannot answer this prescient question with any certainty, no doubt the use of computers and genetic algorithms will afford us powerful tools to peer into hitherto unseen evolutionary mechanisms and prerequisites that must eventually revolutionise current scientific thought. Surely, the future chuckles at contemporary naivety. This side of a paradigm shift, however, we can but bear in mind that today's philosophy is destined to become tomorrow's mythology.
1. Introduction
Life has come a long way from a proposed autopoietic, physicochemical origin, some 3.85 billion years ago. Pre-biotic building blocks readily self-assembling and replicating beneath a reducing atmosphere; a random biological shuffle along a perilous course of 'chance and necessity'; and here we are. And, here we may ponder how Homo sapiens et al 'happened along'. Thanks to Darwin, we know for certain that natural selection acts as an efficient filter of genetic variance that correlates to reproductive success (a contemporary interpretation of evolution might well stop here). That the milieu in which efficient filtration acts can generate countless different paths equalled in reproductive success is the story of Life's biodiversity. However, what has been side-stepped in evolutionary interpretation, what is yet to be sufficiently grappled with in the academic arena, is the thoroughly obliging chemical and physical parameters which permit form, variance and evolution in the first place. How far, for instance, could the evolution of life have proceeded without the inherent mutability of DNA and the self-catalytic properties of RNA? Similarly, what form would the evolution of the chimpanzee hand have taken without lignified tree branches?
The contextual setting in which biological evolution has occurred remains somewhat unsung in evolutionary thinking. Overlooked in importance, Stearns and Hoekstra (2000), for example, refer to the concept of 'context' in passing but once in their book, entitled 'Evolution: an introduction'. As though of little import, the word 'context' fails to appear in the index to their 380-page manual of how and why life came to be how it is. Herein, with reference to the pioneering, re-interpretative work of Simon G. Powell (unpublished manuscript - see abstract), the author hopes to alight upon this important issue and to briefly outline a tentative new look at evolution. But firstly, we must borrow from the musings of Albert Einstein to set the scene for this exposition.
2. Quantum Comprehension
According to Einstein, "the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is it's comprehensibility". That is to say, it is remarkable that a grand and orderly universal pattern can persist throughout time and space and that this universal order lends itself to observation, to retention, and to utilisation - rudimentary or otherwise. Indeed, the Universal pattern lends itself fully to hypothesising, modelling, and ultimately to slowly shifting, paradigmatic world views. To illustrate this important point that our Universe is somehow knowable, consider the antithesis: an incomprehensible, nonsensical Universe, where atoms do not fit neatly into a periodic table, where physics is stochastic, and where no two variables correlate. There could be no evolution of life in such a pattern-less Universe. Thankfully, our physicochemical Universe is an orderly, comprehensible affair; a consolidated system resulting from comprehensible laws and consequential processes which allow for familiarity, elucidation, and syntactical description of those laws and processes. The world is indeed a knowable place.
To take just one example, light is clearly a sensible [i.e. it can be made sense of] phenomenon, one that science fully anticipates. For instance, science can calculate the exact amount of energy carried by any given frequency of light (i.e. Planck's Law, where E always equals hc/»). Likewise, it can predict the degree of absorbency through any given length of any given medium (i.e. the Beer-Lambert Law, where A always equals ecl), and it can explain why it is absorbed and reflected (i.e. due to the presence of double-bonded molecules or chromophores). Furthermore, how light is refracted and split into comprehensible component wavelengths and, of course, its constant speed in a vacuum - these are likewise all well known facets of the perceivable reality of photons. Science knows all of these things, and it knows them well. Clearly, if light were a disorderly phenomenon, a random affair whose behaviour was thoroughly unpredictable, it could not be comprehended, and nothing could be known of it save a mysterious, inexplicable quality. But light is orderly, it is comprehensible, and thus it is usable. By virtue of its inherent orderliness, light is a knowable, usable thing. In this context, consider the following, apt and sensible quote:
Evidently, this same phenomenological, knowable usability holds true for all physical processes (i.e. the seasons and the phases of the Moon for example); for all chemical processes (i.e. soil formation, DNA replication, water evaporation, and REDOX half equations); and for all biological processes (i.e. species recognition and animal foraging patterns). All phenomena present an orderly and comprehensible 'front' of information to a would-be peruser capable of discerning it.
Hence, Einstein has shown us a Universe that is a truly knowable affair; a comprehensible platform of orderliness over which evolution, at its origin, began to crawl. As will be shown, this persistence of comprehensible order fully equates to the later evolution of biological functionality.
3. The Nature Of Nature
It may have appeared somewhat strange to start a précis of evolution with a quote from a physicist. However, that a particular utterance of Einstein's renowned genius could somehow be incorporated into the topical flow of words, such that the result fitted well within the subject matter at hand, has served to demonstrate two things:
1) Selection, a filtration of information - because there are innumerable syntactical arrangements that could be employed.
2) Intelligence - because I came to chose, by a process of elimination, one such variant that made contextual sense.
In this respect, intelligence is the use of information to produce a contextually sensible response - an essay covering the topic of evolution. A child's educational toy, e.g. a set of differing geometric shapes to be placed into corresponding slots (the context), also demonstrates the use of variant information (i.e. a square, a circle, or a triangle) in a contextually sensible manner. An infant who is new to the game may take a long time to place a first geometric shape into an appropriate slot - a task that is initially accomplished by trial and error. It must be noted, however, that the child can only respond sensibly to the task if the 'slot' exhibits a permanence and at least some degree of geometric order. The quicker the child can achieve a contextually sensible response, the more intelligent that child appears to be. However - and note the relevance to contemporary evolutionary thought - if that child were to take approximately 140 million years to accomplish a response, despite being contextually sensible and therefore denoting intelligence, nonetheless, that child would be labelled as 'dumb', or worse, as the antithesis of 'intelligent'!
We live in an 'Information Age', and information is everywhere - in a readily-decipherable state. Since Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA, in 1953, science has quickly unravelled the mysterious chromosome and has come to realise that genes themselves contain information that has been acquired and is therefore heritable, which a living cell employs to regulate itself and to construct duplicates. Where there is genetic variability between alleles and genomes, just as in geometric shapes, there is a difference in the information that those genes and genomes contain, hence there is a difference in the way that genetic information will physically manifest to interact with the environment. Natural selection acts on the interactive form to retain the genetic basis for that form.
The 'Lock and Key' hypothesis proposed to explain enzyme action is a good analogy for context-dependent evolution. If a substrate is analogous to a key, selection of a lock that can bind with it to produce end products must evolve in reference to the orderly properties exhibited by the key itself. If the key were disorderly, if it had a temporal atomic spatial and polar randomness, the enzyme could not be continuously employed to catalyse it. What could? As an example, the orderly, unchanging nature of phosphate groups in undigested foodstuff, coupled with a biological need for phosphate in adenosine mono-, di-, and tri-phosphates, and in all nucleotides, such chemical order and metabolic requirement offers up a persistent pattern from which a suitable enzyme (i.e. phosphatase) can be chosen by selection. Given an orderly context, the response that selection eventually fosters is therefore a contextually sensible one. In the event that a mutation subtly alters the structure of a previously sensible enzyme, depending on the context, perhaps both genetic variants can make functional proteins, and in which case selection will act for --and retain-- both (i.e. alpha and beta haemoglobin).
On a somewhat macroscopic scale, a good example of good contextual sense in evolution is that of photosynthesis. Given the need for energy amidst an abundant source of orderly photon energy, amidst cohesive yet evaporative, stable yet lyse-able water molecules, and given an atmospheric supply of reducible carbon dioxide - delivered to the sugar factory via lawful gaseous diffusion, natural selection acting on genes that encode or control aspects of leaf anatomy or photosynthesis MUST choose variant genetic information precisely because it makes sense of those factors. To illustrate this point, consider that if a mutant allele should code for a product that ultimately makes less contextual sense --i.e. cactus pores that do not fully close when humidity is low (leading to excessive loss of water)-- the mutant gene will not last long in the gene pool because desiccation will eventually eliminate that organism carrying that mutation. Hence, analogously, that biological "idea" would have been dismissed - in that particular instance. In another context, for example where humidity is always high (i.e. in tropical rainforests), such a biological idea could prove sensible because it would save the plant investing energy in a mechanism that had no importance. This again would be a contextually sensible --hence an intelligent-- response fostered by selection from the most appropriate genetic information.
The evolution of the Cactus phenotype made sense amidst arid environmental factors that were prevalent for a period of time sufficient for selection to embed into the genetic library the corresponding books for later reference. Mutations that engendered smaller leaves made sense of excessive evapo-transpiration from a large surface area; selection endowed the cactus with knowledge of free energy changes in water evaporation. Mutations for shallow roots made sense of sparse rainfall, and in that context selection retained them; again, selection endowed the cactus with real knowledge of arid climatic and hydrological patterns. Hence, selection ultimately honed in on such persistent contextual patterns to foster a corresponding genotype-phenotype as a response - as though natural selection were an infant placing genetic shapes into corresponding environmental slots.
Note, this is not to imply that organisms have devised their own phenotype in some kind of neo-Lamarckist manner. What is explicitly stated by the idea of context-dependent filtering of information is, that, ultimately, acting over immense time-scales, by a process of elimination-cum-choice, what comes to be distilled in the vessel of an organism is a phenotypic interactivity that epitomises common sense amidst a sensibly-configured chemical, physical and biological situation. Evolution, like our infant child toying with strange geometric shapes for the very first time, since it eventually fosters appropriate responses, is essentially an intelligent process - no matter how slow it may appear to be.
However, the very
idea that a leaf could be the cumulative result of an ongoing intelligent
process is pure anathema to contemporary science. Here, to mirror the rhetoric
style occasionally employed by Powell himself while in the hot-seat of academic
denigration, he might say that one can only ask this: "if a thin, outstretched,
solar-tracking leaf is not an intelligent response to the order in light,
in carbon dioxide diffusion, and to the need to survive whilst incapable
of movement, then what on earth would be an intelligent response given this
context"? What indeed would an intelligent scientist invent to do the
very same? And, how would that intelligent scientist better the design over
time if not by reference to the order in light and in carbon dioxide diffusion?
If an intelligent scientist could make such a machine that exactly mimicked
a leaf, would 'it' be the result of an intelligent process? If, perchance,
the chemico-physical context was disorderly, how could such a man-made leaf
be achieved? Fortunately, as Einstein has duly noted, these factors are
not disorderly and unknowable, and hence they can be used to advantage by
scientist and by plant alike. Ultimately, the leaf comes to exhibit a practical
knowledge of light, of water and of carbon dioxide - a know-how, or understanding,
that is stored via heritable, genetic libraries.
4. Qualitative Similitude
Considering these notions of natural intelligence, it is interesting to note that: "Darwin distinguished no qualitative difference between artificial selection and natural selection" (Hamilton, 1967). On the contrary, Darwin drew from artificial selection to propose a plausible mechanism for natural selection. In artificial selection, it is a context issuing from the human mind that constitutes order or pattern, amidst which selection acts to filter certain phenotypical traits, honing them toward a context-dependent direction. Despite a ridiculous appearance, the Dachshund phenotype is an intelligent response to the order imposed upon it by Man; it mirrors the 'Kennel Club' principles (or mentality) that elicited it as such.
For natural selection, on the other hand, consider the evolution of dorso-ventrally flattened body profiles and spoiler-like appendages found in Stonefly nymphs (see here). A unidirectional flow of water across a rock surface has an orderly conduct. That is to say, it flows 'one way', with non-random direction down a gradient - by virtue of the dependable pull of gravity. Where there are rocks and substratum there are boundary layers (of approx. 3mm) (Hynes, 1970) where surface drag slows the rate of water flow almost to a halt (see here), making attachment permissible. It is likely to be here that these neat insectile spoilers evolved, functioning analogously to spoilers on racing cars; to maintain traction to the substratum amidst lawful forces of uplift arising along their ventral surfaces. Variant genes (or semes) encoding phenotypic spoiler-like traits were exposed to selection [a filtration of information] in just such a dependably ordered context, and one genetic variant inevitably made better contextual (hydro-dynamical) sense than did the other, and thus underwent selection. Over time, bio-spoilers have come to exhibit a bio-logical knowledge of the physics of boundary layer water flow and its various subtleties. That is, the nymph phenotype mirrors the orderly principles that elicited it as such.
Another very good example of biological, hydrodynamic antiphony can be witnessed in Caddisfly Larvae (see here), also observed amidst unidirectional water flow. Remarkably, these caddisflies encase themselves in small crystalline particles that serve as an effective anchor as well as a safe house. This behaviour makes sense; it is the result of an essentially intelligent process of temporal filtration of information in a context that can be comprehended.
5. The Vine Of Life
In view of all the above arguments, the metaphor of a Tree of Life is somewhat unrepresentative of facts, and is perhaps better portrayed as a Vine of Life, since a vine needs a supportive structure over or up which to climb (source: Powell, personal correspondence). Cellular life has climbed over the supportive structure of DNA, RNA, and carbon-based chemistry in general, which itself has climbed over the supportive structure of forces of atomic attraction and repulsion. When we consider any given biological function, such as sight, we can grasp the concept that order has underpinned it, and that such an orderly phenomenon was the supportive structure over which the eye was led to climb via selective filtration. Consequently, vision came to utilise and to embody the sensibility of order in light, and to make contextual use of that inherent order was clearly intelligent. An organ of vision, then, represents nothing short of knowledge of light (i.e. predominant Angstroms in the solar spectrum), as exhibited by a biological, proteinaceous format.
Examples of such
Natural Intelligence abound, for instance the avian wing, an envious appendage
that makes for easy work of global travel. The supportive structure over
which selection has pulled the wing is air amidst gravitational
forces. Gravity is a constant, and air is uniform, although there is
variance in quality and pressure that generate weather patterns. Air obeys
rules: it sinks when cool and rises when warm. Birds (such as the cliff-dwelling
Fulmar (shown opposite)), together with their learned appendages, have evolved
across these orderly phenomenological structures, fully dependent on their
support for flight. The result is, wings and most aspects of avian morphology
(e.g. legs used as navigational rudders) are the physical embodiment of
knowledge of air and its sensible, navigable properties under sensible forces
of gravity. Likewise, bird eggs that are laid in nests tend sensibly to
be more rounded while those laid precariously on cliff ledges tend sensibly
to taper sharply at one end, causing them to roll in a tight circle rather
than a straight line, hence making extremely good sense of the universal
laws of physics which govern the motion of bodies across surfaces.
Again, if one doubts that evolution is an intelligent learning process, one has only to ask oneself the following challenging question: if a wing is not an intelligent response to the properties of air and gravity, what would be an intelligent response in this context? (note that the intelligent Wright Brothers copied their aerofoil designs from the wings of birds).
Similarly, the helicopter-like zygotes formed by the Sycamore Maple, Acer pseudoplatanus, rely on the properties of air and varying air pressure (wind) to disperse as far afield as possible. This is believed to be a means to avoid intraspecific resource competition - another contextually sensible reason fostered by selection. The ratio of seed head weight to wing weight is exact enough to exemplify the utmost aerodynamic perfection, and contextual selection has made pilots of young Acer offspring. Other seed-producing life have come to learn how negligible weight is beneficial where there is always gravity and wind. Where wind is absent, for example beneath the canopy of a rain forest, life has been endowed with the knowledge that other methods of seed dispersal are more rewarding, for instance where there are always birds and insects.
two cream Limpets clinging to a rock.
if waves come crashing and make a limpet drop, then
one cream limpet becomes genetic stock.
Limpets (i.e. Docoglossida) that grip tightly to the surface of inter-tidal rocks evince another example of natural intelligence. They have worked out the context at hand, or rather selection has worked it all out for them. Extant Prosobranchs represent a biological lineage that came to know all about survival to reproduction, wave action and rock texture. Depending exactly where in the tidal reach they dwell, they can adopt a contextually sensible shell profile - flatter where brutal or raised where gentle waves challenge them. Similarly, Barnacles secrete incredibly tough adhesives, which have attracted the attention of industry. Gluing oneself to the spot amidst pulverising wave action makes good contextual sense, particularly if one has a corresponding solvent to release oneself. Here, again, the evolution of the solvent must have been in reference to the sensible order inherent in the glue. The solvent is thus an intelligent response to the glue; itself an intelligent response to persistent waves and dependable rocks.
As a final short example, consider Biston betularia and 'industrial melanism'. Firstly, it must be said that moths camouflaged as lichen (see here) can only be so because lichen do not exhibit a rapid randomness of morphological form: they are relatively stable phenotypic phenomenon (a dependable structure over which contextual selection can pull that camouflaged branch of the vine of life). Lichen-like moths came to possess this bio-logic where predation and lichen were predictably found. Should the presence of lichen suddenly exit the context (see here), bio-sensitive to pollution as they are, hence calling into question the contextual sensibility of being lichen-coloured on a dark background, selection will again act to favour the most contextually sensible variant genome - that is, a new camouflage: soot-covered bark-like moths.
6. Summary
It has been shown that selection acts on genetic variance within an ordered context and that, ultimately, over immense time scales, selection fosters contextually sensible, apt and indeed ingenious biological responses to that orderliness. Therefore, evolution can be seen as an intelligent, good-reason-fostering process, despite the air of heresy that such an interpretation might carry. Intelligence is a process of employing information contextually - and not a ‘thing' possessed as such.
Simon G. Powell's theory of Natural Intelligence is a parsimonious look at evolution that admits previous interpretations and offers mankind the option to appreciate anew the nature and splendour and value of life and its evolution. If we do choose to acknowledge that evolution is essentially an intelligent process, the widespread ruination of the biosphere, now afoot in earnest, must surely equate to an insult to that intelligence. Perhaps, this incredibly slow, intelligent process of evolution arrives at a conscious brain as easily as it arrives at an eye or a wing. The cognitive machinery of we Homo sapiens sapiens is a product of contextual selection; the result of an efficient filtration of information, as partially related by Stearns & Hoekstra (2000). Moreover, it is clear that 'mind' has evolved in response to the very comprehensibility of the Universe that Einstein so effortlessly pondered.
7. Bibliography
Powell SG
Natural Intelligence: Lessons from
the Jesus Lizard
Unpublished Manuscript (with foreword by Dorion Sagan)
Stearns SC and Hoekstra RF
Evolution: An Introduction
Oxford University Press : 2000 : ISBN 0-19-854968-7 : p13
Ehrlich PR and Holm RW
The Process of Evolution
McGraw-Hill Book Company : 1963 : pp125-127
Hamilton TH
Process and Pattern in Evolution
The Macmillan Company : 1967
Dawkins R
Climbing Mount Improbable
Penguin Books : 1979 : ISBN 0-14017918-6
Peitgen HO, Jürgens H, and Saupe D
Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers
of Science
Springer-Verlag : 1992 : ISBN 0-387-97903-4
Hull DH
Darwin and His Critics: The Reception
of Darwin's Ideas by the Scientific Community
Harvard University Press : 1973 : pp56-57
Koller LR
Ultraviolet Radiation: 2nd
Edition
John Wiley & Sons, Inc : 1964
Barnes RSK, Calow P, Olive PJW, Golding
DW, and Spicer JI
The Invertebrates: A Synthesis, 3rd
Edition
Blackwell Science : 2001 : ISBN 0-632-04761-5
~~~
Illustration Source
Front cover image of Fish Morphology taken from:
The Ecology of Running Waters by Hynes HBN
Liverpool University Press : 1976 : ISBN 0-85323-100-1
~
Images of the Stonefly Nymph, Bracyptera risi, the Prosobranch Limpet, Docoglossida, and the Cup-Eye Schematic taken from:
The Invertebrates: A Synthesis, 3rd
Edition by Barnes RSK, Calow P, Olive PJW,
Golding DW, and Spicer JI
Blackwell Science : 2001 : ISBN 0-632-04761-5
~
Image of the Caddisfly Larvae, Setodes argentipunctella, taken from:
Caddis: A Short Account of the Biology of British
Caddisflies, With Special Reference to Immature Stages by Hickin NE
Methuen & Co. Ltd : 1952 : Cat. No. 4530/U
~
Image of leaf venation taken from:
Kimberley Biology Pages
http://www.ultranet.com/_jkimball/BiologyPages/L/Leaf.html
~
Image of the Cliff-dwelling Fulmar taken from:
The Encyclopaedia of British Birds by Campbell D
Parragon : 2001 : ISBN 0-75256-657-1
~
Image of Biston betularia taken from
The Process of Evolution by
Ehrlich PR and Holm RW
McGraw-Hill Book Company : 1963
~~~
Thanks must go to Powell SG himself for supplying inspiration.
