In recent years there has arisen a conflict between people promoting religious and scientific views of man's origin. This conflict has had the unfortunate effect of distracting scientists from the logical problems of evolutionary theory. A scientist raising a logical problem is treated with suspicion by the rest of the scientific community as probably having a hidden religious agenda. I want to raise some of the logical problems on this site. At the start, I make it clear that my objections have nothing to do with religion or disputed facts. My concern is with the theory's logic.
I mentioned the Blind Watchmaker problem earlier, but will repeat it here for completeness. I also want to show it in a slightly different light.
Richard Dawkins makes a good case that evolution is 'undirected', that it happens according to the blind forces of physics and is not aiming towards (i.e., cannot be predicted to arrive at) any particular outcome. The products of evolution - animals and plants - have an essential randomness built into them, and this makes it impossible in principle to predict their existence in advance.
Given that Dawkins is right about this (and I am sure he is), we face the problem of knowing when one of these evolutionary products arrives in our world. I gave the example of 'meringue-utans' earlier - unknown animals existing undiscovered in some jungle somewhere. They have arisen 'in themselves' by the blind forces of evolution, and are happily enjoying life without humans interfering with them or even knowing of their existence.
Given this scenario, do the meringue-utans really exist? Most of us would say that we have to know about them before we can say that. It would be nice if we could get this knowledge by predicting them in some way - perhaps by using the equations of physics - but that is impossible in principle.
It seems that the only way we can learn of the meringue-utans' existence is to observe them. That might be done by eyes, ears, smell, deduction from other evidence - or in other ways - but the observation will lead to our belief in the reality of those animals.
Is this observation an essential part of the evolutionary scheme? Many scientists would instinctively say no. The meringue-utans exist in themselves, they would say, and that is all that the evolutionary process leads to.
This might seem a reasonable answer, but strictly speaking it means we have to take the meringue-utans as real before we see them - which means before we know they are real. Logically, if self-existence is the criterion for reality then we have no choice but to treat unknown self-existing objects as real.
Clearly, this is absurd. It is impractical and antiscientific to treat unknown things - things that not only are we ignorant of but do not even conceive as possibly existing - as real. If we were to treat unknown meringue-utans as real, we would be obliged to treat a lot of other unknown things as real too (God, angels, and so on) if unbeknown to us those things existed in themselves.
These arguments suggest that observation is indeed an essential component of evolutionary theory. All sorts of exotic creatures might be produced by the evolutionary process but unless they impact on us in some way (i.e., we 'observe' them), we are obliged to treat them as non-existent, or 'not real'. We cannot even refer to them as 'them'. They are totally outside the logic of our world.
Note that we are obliged to treat these evolutionary products as non-existent even though they exist in themselves. If the only knowledge of the existence of meringue-utans is by the meringue-utans themselves, then they are not real objects of our world. According to us, they do not exist. Self-existence simply is not enough to make an object real; it also needs to be known about.
But 'known about' implies a dependence on us humans, and there are fish-hooks in having reality dependent on us in that way. Most scientists would react in horror at the idea.
How can we have reality dependent on self-existence and knowledge of it, but not have it dependent on humans or their knowledge of things? I will describe a possible way of achieving this. I do not accept this solution myself as it amounts to avoiding the problem. I don't think we should solve any problem by pretending it doesn't exist.
Here's how the would-be solution goes. We could agree that I couldn't call the meringue-utans 'meringue-utans', or write down anything about them, and certainly couldn't mention 'jungle' in their connection, if their existence wasn't already known about i.e., if they weren't already accepted as real! So we start with the idea that they are known to exist. Then we can say that the meringue-utans do indeed exist, and there is no question of their non-existence, or of the need for humans to get knowledge of this fact.
If we don't have knowledge of their existence at the start, then I can't write anything about them, or even refer to them as 'them'. They don't exist! Nor are they even conceived to possibly exist ...
In this underhand way we avoid the problem of having to acknowledge the essential role that man's knowledge plays in the reality of meringue-utans. It is not a satisfactory solution to the problem because it does not respect the distinction between language and the artefacts of language. Language has content, the artefacts of language do not. The would-be solution I have just outlined depends on language artefacts and is therefore deficient.
The artefacts arise in the following way. In introducing the idea of meringue-utans, I was considering an unspecified evolutionary product that had arisen through the processes of evolution. This evolutionary product was to be considered a living thing that had arisen under those natural processes, but was totally unknown to us. It was only known to itself. It could not be pictured by us, even in broad terms, and it certainly didn't have a name that I could refer to. But it was to be considered a genuine 'thing' that had arisen through the blind forces of evolution. The only characteristic that the thing had was self-existence, and the only knowledge of that self-existence was by the thing itself.
In this situation, therefore, when I use the word 'them' to talk about these evolutionary products, I am using this word as a 'place-holder' in the sentence. The place-holder stands for the self-existing object that I am talking about, but it does not mean that I know anything about the object. The same thing goes for the name that I chose. It was a placeholder for an unknown name. These placeholders are artefacts. In truth, the object is defined solely by its self existence, and that's all we can say about it.
After considering this situation, I feel that others will conclude, as I did, that the 'thing' referred to - the evolutionary product totally unknown to us and known only to itself - is not real. 'Of course it isn't real!' some will say. 'What's all the fuss about?' Well, the fuss arises because we are presuming this unknown 'thing' to exist in itself, because that's how it is defined. And something that exists in itself surely should be treated as real, because that's how reality is defined.
So we have a dilemma. On the one hand we don't want reality to depend on man's knowledge of it. On the other hand, we don't want to treat self-existent things as real when we don't know about them.
Some people avoid the dilemma by taking the misguided approach to language that I alluded to above. They say that my use of language guarantees the existence of the things referred to in the language. Writing a sentence implies that the things referred to in the sentence do exist (either actually or hypothetically). In my view, this is taking liberties with language. Language is a tool for communicating ideas, and the ideas exist independently of the language used to communicate them. We should look to the ideas themselves, and not rely on language artefacts to hide things we find uncomfortable.
Surely it is a legitimate idea to suppose that an animal can evolve unknown to us? When I use language to express this idea, I necessarily introduce language artefacts. One of these is that I need to have objects in my sentences, because language without objects doesn't make sense. I am forced to use objects when communicating ideas to other people, and I might conveniently give these objects names such as 'meringue-utan', or refer to them as 'them'. But that does not mean that these words refer to known objects. The presumed characteristics of the things that I am referring to exist only for the sake of my language; they are an artefact. They do not exist on account of the idea that the language expresses.
I am suggesting that we recognise this artefact of language and discount it. Refusing to do so would be like refusing to ignore friction when discussing Newton's laws of motion. We can imagine a 'doctrinaire' criticism of Newton's laws in which someone refuses to accept his laws because friction is always present in practise. Technically, the laws do not hold if friction is included. But the rest of us recognise friction as an artefact and ignore it, and that allows us to see that a truth is indeed being expressed by the laws. We should be equally magnanimous in the present case. It means accepting that language has artefacts and that an idea is expressed behind the words used to state the idea. The idea in question, in the present case, is that an animal exists totally unknown to us. It has arisen via the blind forces of evolution, and the only knowledge of that existence is by the animal itself.
If we are magnanimous, we will admit that the dilemma I have been describing remains. We remain in a quandary as to whether to define reality solely in terms of self-existence, or whether it should be self-existence together with our knowledge of it.
Regarding the reality or otherwise of meringue-utans, my own opinion is that if the only hint of a thing's existence is held by the thing itself, then the thing can have no impact on us or our world and we are entitled to treat it as not real. (This doesn't mean discarding it; it means not even conceiving it to discard.) Common-sense suggests that a 'thing' needs to have some feature other than self-existence - some externally-directed feature that impinges on us and contributes to the logic of our world - to make it real.
Unfortunately, evolutionary theory does not agree with this common-sense opinion. Evolutionary theory says that objects that arise via the unpredictable processes of biological evolution, and which exist in themselves but are totally unknown to us, nevertheless are real objects of our world. They are real because they self-exist.
This self-existence axiom is vitally necessary for the coherence of evolutionary theory. Self-existence of evolutionary products is required so that the theory can continually switch to the viewpoint of these objects. If the objects were not self-real, we couldn't switch to their viewpoint. We would be obliged to see everything from whatever viewpoint we started with, using the deterministic laws of physics to project the present into the future. But evolutionary theory explicitly rules out deterministic laws. We need some other way of obtaining the future from the past. So we decide that self-existent objects can take over the job. Evolutionary products shall see their own existence and avoid the need for man to see them. Evolutionary theory wouldn't make sense without the axiom that self-existing evolutionary products are real objects of our world. They have to be real objects so that they can accept transference of our theoretical viewpoint to them.
I think this is a dodgy aspect of evolutionary theory. I find it hard to believe that self-existent-but-totally-unknown objects can be real solely because they are known to themselves. If we accept such an idea with evolutionary products, we are obliged to do the same with God (he being another self-existent object totally unknown to science), with angels... and so on. Instead we should replace the axiom that says self-existent-but-totally-unknown objects are real with an observation axiom. The new axiom would say that objects have to be observed, or must convince us in some other way of their existence (i.e., must contribute to the logic of our world), before they can be considered real objects of our world. That is what this web site is about.
Many intelligent people don't see the problem and don't see a need to do anything about it. Certainly they don't want to tamper with evolution's axioms. Why don't they see the problem? I think they commit an elementary error of logic similar to the 'use/mention' error in philosophy. Philosophy's use/mention error concerns the difference between what an object is and what it is called (or between how it is used and how it is mentioned). What an object is can be understood in terms of how it fits into the world i.e., is 'used'. What it is called is up to us. We could change what it is called and still be referring to the same object. In the early 20th century this distinction was not clear. Philosophers changed the name of an object and thought that the object itself was changed.
Some people commit the use/mention error in word pronunciation. They might pronounce 'Iran' as 'eye-ran', for instance, on the assumption that a letter called 'eye' should be pronounced 'eye'. But of course, 'eye' is only the letter's name. Its 'use' pronunciation (at least according to international authority and American historical practice) is 'ee'. (When the vowel is short, as in Iran, the pronunciation moves to the shorter form of 'ee' as in 'thick'.)
Sorting out the use/mention error in philosophy took far longer than it ought to because people were obliged to get their logic clear and give up certain prejudices. We are required to do the same here. The problem I am talking about is akin to asking whether a sentence must be formulated for the reality conveyed by the sentence to exist, or whether reality can exist independently of a sentence conveying it from one person to another. Scientists traditionally have insisted on reality being real only if it is conveyable from one person to another. If the reality can't be written down, spoken about, kicked, pointed out, seen, or otherwise communicated to another person, then it doesn't exist.
Yet evolutionary theory says that incommunicable reality does exist! It says that evolutionary products that can't be written down, spoken about, kicked, pointed out, seen, or otherwise communicated to other people, nevertheless are real. They are real because they have 'selves' and those selves see their self-existence!
This constitutes a real muddle in the theory of biological evolution. The theory on this site is intended to sort it out by having all objects - biological or otherwise - as not real until they are believed to exist. 'Believed' means that for any of a variety of reasons we accept them as real. This seems such a reasonable resolution of the muddle that one might wonder why anyone would object to it. But scientists know full-well the pitfalls implied by the word 'believed'. They know that if belief has a logically-prior relationship to reality (i.e., reality doesn't exist until believed to), then belief needs to be accommodated within science. Not only is that a distasteful thought, they wonder how it could be done.
The answer I am proposing here is that belief be accommodated in the domain of logic. If we accept this accommodation, and also accept that logic lies outside possible worlds, then we obtain a worldview that is remarkably productive in solving many of the problems of science and philosophy.
Actually, in physics we have long toyed with the idea that observation is somehow involved in the reality of objects. But we have only 'toyed' with the idea because we have tended to think that observation has to be a matter of eyes, ears, or some other mechanical thing. We have failed to generalise 'observation' to 'believing', and to recognise that the home of belief is not in physical things but in logic. Belief cannot, of course, have a home in physical things if it is the effective creator of physical things. Obviously something that creates objects cannot be an object itself or be determined by objects. Thus the objects known as brain cells cannot determine belief. (But it is possible to have things the other way round. i.e., we might believe brain cells to exist.)
Einstein accepted that reality was objective and had to stay the same regardless of who views it. An objective thing exists in itself, and a 'self' does not change merely on account of someone viewing it. He realised that different people looking at reality nevertheless will see things differently, because they are looking from different vantage points. If different people see different things, obviously they will make different judgements as to what reality consists of. Einstein realised that to get knowledge of true reality - the reality that exists independently of people's objective viewpoints - we need to discount the objective seeing process and look at what's left.
That was Einstein's guiding principle. He could have applied it in various areas of physics and philosophy, but chose to concern himself with the viewpoints of different observers in relative motion. He wanted to find the laws that applied once the artefacts of motion were discounted. But the objects controlled by the laws were not his concern. His only concern was with the laws themselves. As far as objects were concerned, he was content to accept the prevailing view that objects had 'selves', and it was these that ensured that the objects remained invariant to different people's viewpoints.
I have already extended Einstein's philosophical principle of relativity from the invariance of dynamical laws to the invariance of objects. We now understand why objects are invariant. They stay the same regardless of people having different views of them because we give them a self to ensure that.
I now want to consider Einstein's philosophical relativity principle in a different context: evolutionary theory. I will show that evolution's law of 'natural selection' is not a law of reality at all, because it depends on the observer's viewpoint. [Ref. 10]
There are many ways of expressing evolution's law of natural selection: struggle for survival, adaptation to the environment, survival of the fittest, competition for resources, and so on. They all mean roughly the same thing. A process of weeding-out occurs such that only some species of biological object get chosen for continued existence, and the losers cease to exist. The question we ask is this: Is evolution's law of natural selection a reality of the world? In Einstein's terms, this is asking whether this supposed 'law' is the same for all observers. Only if a would-be law is independent of viewpoints can it be considered a real law.
The answer to this question is clearly no. Winners of natural selection might see natural selection as a true law, because it determines their own existence. But losers don't see it that way. They don't see natural selection as a law necessary for existence, because they don't see anything. They are dead! They would term the supposed law a recipe for chaos, for descent into nothingness.
No matter how we translate our metaphors, it is clear that losers and winners will have different retrospective views of natural selection. The winner will see it as good or necessary for existence, while the loser who has gone out of existence will have a particularly dim view of it. I trust that readers will not make the mistake of asking 'Who cares about the view of something that doesn't exist?' We are talking about the physical products of evolution, collections of inanimate molecules. None of these particle-sets has a 'view' of things, not even the winner. The winner is just as much a pile of inanimate molecules as is the loser. We can just as legitimately take the view of one pile of particles as the other.
In science, it is common to take the viewpoint of a particle, or other lifeless object, as a way of understanding the truth of a physical situation. In relativity theory, for instance, we might adopt the viewpoint of a photon and show that time stands still for it. We are actually imagining an observer associated with the photon, rather than the photon itself being an observer. The laws of reality will be deduced from what these imaginary observers report. It is only when we discount the peculiar viewpoints of different observers that we can find out what is happening in reality. I repeat that reality does not depend on viewpoint. It is independent of how individual people see things. It is also independent of how the imaginary observers associated with lifeless bunches of molecules see things.
In the case of evolutionary theory, the viewpoint associated with the pile of molecules that is the winner clearly is different from the viewpoint associated with the pile of molecules that is the loser. Unless we can reconcile those two viewpoints, we will not have a real law. It seems to me that the only way we can get a reconciliation is to take a 'meta' viewpoint of the situation, the viewpoint of a deity, perhaps. The deity can look down on the winners and the losers and see that something essential to reality results from the conflict that created them. In the absence of a deity, it appears reconciliation is not possible. We cannot associate an imaginary viewpoint with a deity if a deity does not exist. We cannot take the viewpoint of anything outside the world if the world does not have an outside. The conclusion we come to is that natural selection cannot be a real law.
It is easy for us to take the outside view and to make judgements from an outside platform. We imagine ourselves looking down on the world from on high and observing the animals and plants that exist. From that viewpoint, we conclude, retrospectively, that natural selection is necessary for those things to exist.
But I repeat that taking an 'outside' view (the viewpoint of God) is not valid in science. We are only allowed to take the viewpoint of something within the system. And taking a retrospective stance is doubtful too. Evolution is a theory of how objects come to exist. It should be formulated from the viewpoint that those objects do not yet exist and are not even conceived as ever existing. From that viewpoint - the viewpoint of evolution's pre-cursor objects - we need laws that are seen equally by all pre-cursor objects. In particular the laws must be independent of which pre-cursor objects are destined to go out of existence in evolution's struggle and which are not. 'Destined' is something that only an outside agent can see. An inside being - a pre-cursor object - cannot see the future unless that future is determined by the past. In the case of biological evolution, determination from the past is ruled out.
If we look at things in this light, the supposed law of natural selection does not live up to the spirit of Einstein's (philosophical) relativity principle. We continually shift our viewpoint to that of natural selection's winners - the viewpoint of objects that exist. Never do we take the viewpoint of objects that don't exist. We might ask again: 'How is it possible to take the viewpoint of something that doesn't exist, and never did?' The answer is that it is not possible. But that only means we must not treat natural selection as a real law - not if we are to preserve the relativity principle. The supposed law is merely the prejudiced view of winners, the viewpoint of objects that exist on account of us seeing them.
My attention was drawn to this problem when evolution's 'law' of natural selection was transcribed with a vengeance into economic theory in the 1970s. Before that time, all sorts of clever schemes had been under consideration to solve the world's economic and social problems. The economists decided that we should put cleverness aside and rely on blind competition. They pointed to the wonderful results that Nature had achieved by using blind competition in the field of biology. But the economists failed to appreciate the logical problem that I have just outlined. They made the mistake of taking the prejudiced viewpoint of winners as an indicator of 'reality'.
The economists made another serious error of logic. In going along with blind competition, they were deliberately shunning clever solutions that various people were putting forward. But man's cleverness was produced by evolution for survival. It arose through the blind processes of evolution, and did so because it was needed as a survival tool. Clearly, if we are to survive, we need to use this tool! [Ref. 11]
In economics, it is rather easy to see that the viewpoint of winners is a prejudiced viewpoint. Even the most right-wing economist can see that the losers will not describe their view as wonderful. To get their winner-prejudiced ideas accepted, therefore, right-wing economists make concessions attractive to the losers - 'trickle-down' wealth dispersal, for instance, or 'welfare'. [Ref. 12]
But in evolutionary theory the prejudice of winners is hidden. We do not see that evolution's winners have a special viewpoint, because we do not see the losers' existence. The latter are the objects that didn't quite make it into existence, so of course we don't see them. This is not a matter of seeing them and then disregarding them, it is a matter of not seeing their existence to start with.
One of evolution's winners is man. From our winner's podium we develop an evolutionary theory based on the viewpoint of a winner. We incorporate natural selection in our theory: a winner is obliged to include whatever it is that makes him a winner. Our winning, and the selection that caused it, are important ingredients in our worldview.
Having done that, we latch onto the word 'selection' and decide that our theory needs a selecting agent. We decide that 'a suitable environment' would do the job, and contrive to see the existence of such a thing. Then we look at the workings of this environment and describe them as 'natural' - independent of us. Hey presto! we have a theory of natural selection. It is a theory that explains our existence, and it allows us to congratulate ourselves on knowing the truth about the world.
But of course, the truth does not lie in such biases. The truth is what remains when the biases are discounted. Yes, the biases are difficult to get rid of them. But we need to recognise them, because only if we acknowledge the truth can we make progress.
One of the things we can do to redress the situation - to discount our biases - is to deliberately avoid favouring winners. That is, don't look at things from a 'competition' viewpoint. When there is no competition, there are no winners and losers and no possibility of favouring one group or the other. It might be relatively easy to imagine the absence of competition in the case of economic theory, but in evolutionary theory it means doing away with natural selection as the supposed cause of living things' existence. What would be the origin of living things then? A difficult question. But there is an alternative to natural selection. All we need to do is recognise, on logical grounds, that it is our seeing of evolutionary products that causes them to be real objects of our world. The selection is done by us, albeit unconsciously. We believe some things to exist and not others. In this way we preserve natural selection, but it is no longer done by a contrived environment; it is done by logic.
Notwithstanding what I have said here, biologists tend to believe that mechanical selection is indeed a fundamental rule of Nature. But this belief is inconsistent with some of the biologists' other beliefs. In addition to believing in natural selection, biologists tend to believe that everything biological is ultimately explicable in terms of physical laws. Straight away we have an incompatibility. Physical laws mean physics, and physics has no truck with natural selection. The idea of objects competing with each other for existence is fantasy to physicists. The physicists are also wary of the way that natural selection has an essential dependence on the flow of time, because time does not 'flow' to them - it is just 'there'. If there is selection-in-time (i.e., natural selection), why not selection-in-space? Or better still, why not selection of space-time events?
Biologists have two options if they want to resolve the incompatibility of their beliefs. Either get physicists to incorporate natural selection into physics as a physical law, or themselves accept that biological phenomena are outside physics. The latter would mean that the world is not a matter of physics alone. The biologists can't have it both ways. They can't say 'everything is physical', but then treat natural selection as not physical.
A third option, and the correct one in my opinion, is to drop natural selection as an objective law of Nature. We can still keep the selection aspect of it, but it will not be selection by a mechanical environment. Instead, the selection will be done by software, by us seeing things to exist. Selection of reality must be done from outside reality, of course, and the only thing out there is logic. (Again, I ignore the possibility of a deity). So the selection must be done by logic.
As we know, it is possible to model evolution on a computer, because evolution is a well-understood mechanical process that computers are easily programmed to mimic. Richard Dawkins and others have done such computer simulations, and they demonstrate a curious phenomenon rather like the 'halting problem' in theoretical mathematics. I outline it here.
In computer simulations of evolution, the randomness that evolution relies upon can be simulated by pseudo-random noise generators (PRNGs). Any given experiment will require the experimenters to initialise the PRNGs, to choose an initial state for the hardware, and to set the selection environment. In principle, each of those variables can be represented by a number, and then the numbers combined into a single number that uniquely represents a particular experiment. (The Darwinian algorithm must be programmed into the computer too, but that is constant across different experiments.)
Suppose that the 'single number' for a given experiment is 10 and that it results in the appearance of an evolved object on the computer's screen after six hours. For definiteness, let us imagine the object on the screen to be a kiwi bird. (Such an object is far beyond present-day computer abilities, however.) The computer simulation is deterministic in the sense that the number 10 always results in the appearance of the kiwi bird after six hours.
Given the unexpected appearance of the kiwi bird on the screen, can we say that the experiment was a success i.e., that it faithfully portrayed real-life evolution?
There would appear to be a problem in saying yes to this question. If the number 10 always results in a kiwi bird, then the number might as well be the kiwi bird. (Simulated, of course). Before entering the number 10 - in fact before the number 10 is chosen - somebody of great intelligence could examine the computer to see how it manipulates numbers, then, when told that the chosen number is 10, could immediately say 'Aha! You want a kiwi bird!' There would be no need to actually run the experiment and look at the screen - the kiwi bird would already be implied in the number 10. That would mean we have a predictable evolutionary scenario, which would contradict evolutionary theory. It appears that we do in fact gain something by actually running the experiment rather than by merely looking at the algorithm and its initial conditions.
What we gain by running the computer is knowledge of the time that the kiwi bird appears on the screen. I was not being honest in saying that the person merely had to be given the single number 10. The person also needs to be given a time at which to report the screen's content, in this case at the six-hour mark. The computer experiment might run for a million years, producing a great variety of uninteresting junk on its screen. But we see something interesting - a kiwi bird - at a particular time and take a snapshot of the screen. We write down the time that this occurs. The computer can be considered to 'halt' at that moment because it has produced the new species that we are looking for. The 'halting problem' that I'm talking about arises because theoretically the computer will go on forever. The computer itself never knows when a new object (species) arrives on the screen, which would be the signal to stop. There is a strong analogy here with Turing's work.
In practise, human failings get in the way of things and people fail to see the halting problem. When they see something interesting on the screen, they make the mistake of saying that the computer produced that screen. But it didn't. That particular screen was interesting for one reason only: the researchers chose it from outside the system. They brought to the experiment an unconscious set of interesting objects in their minds, then monitored the screen to get something that they vaguely wanted. In effect, they selected one screen from the 8 x 1014 screens that would appear over a million years. The screen was special on account of that selecting. But ontologically that particular screen was no different from any of the other screens, even those showing meaningless nonsense at the start.
These considerations reinforce the idea that the real-life selecting mechanism in evolution is not some convenient 'environment' that we contrive to exist, but is indeed us. It is just as much us in real life as it is us in computer simulations of real life. We are the ones that select what objects shall exist in our world. Our seeing a meringue-utan in the jungle is the same process as seeing a kiwi bird on a computer screen. Neither object is interesting until we see it. Neither object is real until we see it. Neither object is even conceived as possibly existing until we see it! Both objects might preexist in some possible world, but they don't exist in our world, the real world, until believed to.
Our role as selecting agents is easily overlooked in computer simulations. A simulation can go on for a long time before we see something meaningful on the screen. When we do see a meaningful object, it is almost impossible not to believe that the computer produced it. In a way it did produce it. But it didn't produce the selecting of it, and that is the important thing. The selecting was done unconsciously by us - by us believing that meaningful object to exist.
Another problem with the theory of biological evolution centres on the 'environment' that is so essential to the evolutionary process. As we know, the evolutionary environment is divided into a part that causes mutation (variation) and a part that causes selection. The division of the environment into these two categories seems to be a matter of human whim, something we do after an evolutionary product is seen to exist.
Suppose a chromium atom exists in the environment. If it interacts with an organism in a certain way it might cause a mutation that leads to enhanced fitness for that species, the species achieving a step up the evolutionary ladder as a result. Or the chromium atom might be poisonous to that species, and kill it off. Or it might be poisonous to competitors of the species, and again cause an advance of the species under consideration. Which of these is it to be? The answer we give is: It depends. We only give the real answer when we see what happens in a particular case!
This is a deeply unsatisfying answer, because it has a strong, unscientific dependence on humans. Organisms are real, and mutations really are different from selections. We want to know the reality of the situation, the truth about chromium atoms. We don't want human-dependent attributions of reality after the event.
The situation is similar to Charles Darwin's subjectivity in making his theory 'absolutely dependent' on numerous, slight modifications to organisms. Darwin should have replaced 'numerous' by (for example) eight, and 'slight' by (for example) 1%. Making those replacements would have taken the subjectivity out of his theory and avoided the retrospective assignment of reality values. But he chose the answer 'it depends'.
The intriguing thing about evolution's mutation-versus-selection division of the environment is that it is very similar to a division that occurs in particle physics. There, the distinction is between the measuring apparatus and the object being measured. It is a distinction that seems to have an essential dependence on humans, because, if humans don't make it, a measurement doesn't occur and no reality emerges from the experiment. (The Many World's alternative interpretation - with or without the 'decoherence' augmentation - attempts to get around this conclusion, but it is flawed by various intrusions of human subjectivity.)
In the Copenhagen Interpretation of particle physics, suppose a measurement is made of an atom but the experimenter does not look directly at the result, but takes a photograph of the dial-pointer. Does the measurement still get made? No. The reality of the atom's measurement gets delayed, and does not come into existence until the experimenter looks at the photographs produced by the camera. That could be the next day. The reason for this bizarre behaviour is that technically the camera is part of the measuring apparatus and it is only when the experimenter 'checks the apparatus' - now including the camera - that the measurement is complete.
I gave the explanation for this curious behaviour earlier on this site. Reality comes into existence when it enters the logic of the world. Until the experimenter believes the measurement to be measurement, the measurement's result does not take part in the world's logic. The logic in question is what the world believes. But the world believes nothing about the atom until the experimenter looks at the photographs.
In both cases - physics and evolution - the position of the dividing line is up to us. It is man that determines where reality shall lie.
Given the similarity between these two cases, let us decide that both cases are indeed the same problem (i.e., they are not just similar). In that case we reach a fascinating conclusion. The apparent difference between the two cases is that, with evolution, the mutation/selection division of the environment is made 100% after the event. In the physics case, the division between object being measured and measurement apparatus is made 100% before the event. If the two cases are to be the same, time must drop out of the picture! Then all that we have left is the present. This agrees with the theory on this site, which holds that reality is what is believed to exist, belief being a timeless aspect of logic.
The conventional biological explanation of animal behaviour is simplistic in the extreme: an animal does what it does because if it didn't, it wouldn't exist. There are problems with that explanation. [Ref. 13] However, my concern here is not with soft-and-mushy biology but with taut-and-precise physics. I want to know the explanation of animal behaviour in terms of particle physics. What physical reason lies behind the behaviour of, say, an antelope running away from a lion?
As in so much of modern evolutionary theory, Richard Dawkins provides the lead for this solution (although he might not recognise it). In 1976 when he published The Selfish Gene, Dawkins said the reason for the existence of biological objects was stability - things falling into stable patterns. Dawkins saw this stability in terms of a gene's longevity (possibly thousands of years), in the existence of multiple copies of the gene, and in how quickly those copies could be produced. He was rather astray on some of these things, as I have been describing, but his recognition of the importance of stability is a key step in solving the puzzle of animal behaviour. However, biological stability needs to be given an interpretation in terms of hard physics, as follows.
Stability, in a physical system, is a state of minimum energy. [Ref. 14] Animal behaviour can be identified with progress towards reaching a state of the world where local energy (in a hard, physical sense) has been reduced towards a minimum. An absolute minimum is never reached. The process is one of continuous energy reduction, and stability is only achieved when observers cannot see any further reduction occurring. [Ref. 15] In evolution as much as in any other area of physics, the energy that needs to be minimised is the electrical potential energy and kinetic energy of particles.
How does an antelope running away from a lion represent a reduction in electrical energy? The explanation is simple but somewhat tricky. The antelope's behaviour is unconsciously directed at causing more of her genes to exist in the future. Those genes are physical gene molecules. They are not just 'information patterns'. A physical gene molecule is a combination of various atoms, notably carbon and oxygen, which has arisen because it represents a state of reduced energy compared with those carbon and hydrogen atoms being free in the environment. We can picture high energy carbon and oxygen atoms milling about in the environment looking for a place to rest, but being unable to do so until catalysed by some mechanism. They eventually achieve the state of rest via the mechanism of a baby antelope. The more baby antelopes get born, the more physical gene molecules come to exist in their bodies. This means more high-energy carbon and oxygen atoms in the environment finding a place of relative rest in their bodies. It is this reduction in the world's energy that drives the world to this state. It is the reason why antelopes run away from lions.
The carbon and oxygen atoms could combine directly into carbon dioxide and find a greater state of rest than in the gene molecule, but the environment does not allow that to happen. The environment would need to produce a spark or some other ignition source. This shows that evolution is a local phenomenon. Things happen according to what is at hand rather than according to some global scheme. It also shows that evolution (actually 'behaviour', but the two processes are similar) is deterministic in the sense that what happens, or does not happen, is specified by the immediate environment i.e., by what atom touches what other atom, and so on. Globally (i.e., taking an outside view) we would say that a carbon atom should combine with an oxygen atom directly to form a carbon dioxide molecule. Globally, the carbon and oxygen molecules have no need to take a long-winded route involving animals. But our global opinion does not count. What counts is the opinion of the local environment. This says that the only way those particular carbon and oxygen molecules can come together is in a gene molecule.
This physical explanation of animal behaviour (as an activity that catalyses the reduction in energy of unrelated objects) can be pictured as follows. Imagine a lake at the top of a mountain. The water in the lake is at a high potential energy and we might expect it to run down to the valley floor to minimise its energy. However, the environment does not allow the water to run out because the lake is surrounded by an earthen shore. But suppose that some water does in fact manage to seep out. As expected, the seeping water reduces its energy. But it also does something else: it forms a small channel which unwittingly catalyses the escape of more water. So more water flows down the channel, making it wider and allowing even more water to escape. When the channel gets bigger, we are able to see it. The channel now exists in its own right. It is a new object in the world, and it is something that has evolved.
Let us suppose that we see several of these interesting water channels. Also, let us suppose that, for some unspecified reason, we do not notice the water associated with the channels. In this scenario, we might give the following 'biological' explanation of the channels' activity, the activity in question being the tendency for channels to indulge in 'channel behaviour' (i.e., the consumption of soil and extension of a growing point). Our 'biological' explanation of this activity might be this: river channels must do that sort of thing because the channel 'species' wouldn't exist if they didn't!
The physical explanation of the channels' activity, on the other hand, is that something else (the water) achieves a state of reduced energy by the channel doing what it does. It is this future state of the world - the state of reduced energy of this other substance - that drives the behaviour that we see.
This explanation has the flavour of an end result causing the earlier activity leading to the achievement of the end result. It is similar to the way that the stability of a lead sulphide precipitate, for example, causes lead and sulphur to combine to form that particular precipitate. The precipitate causes the earlier activity that leads to the precipitate existing.
In physical terms, the driving force for animal behaviour is the reduction of energy that occurs when the physical precursors of a gene molecule are catalysed by the reproduction process into coalescing into that particular gene molecule. As I warned, this is a rather tricky driving force. On one hand it is probably the correct physical explanation of evolution, because it simply amounts to saying that evolution is just another way that Nature has found to reduce the energy of the world. On the other hand, we might be suspicious of the way that we pick out particular energy sinks to be the cause of the activity which leads into those sinks. There are lots of energy sinks in the physical world, and lots of ways that high energy objects might be sent into them. Why should the reduction take place via the long-winded process of animal reproduction? We could say again that the answer lies in the environment. The environment is extraordinarily particular and does not allow other ways of reducing the energy to occur. But passing things over to an extraordinarily particular environment does not gain us anything, as we would want to know why the environment happens to be so special.
In soft biological terms (i.e., metaphor), the problem of antelope behaviour is to explain how the antelope 'knows' that her present behaviour will cause a proliferation of her genes in the future. In physical terms, this is asking how a certain state of the world (a new-born antelope) causes the earlier activity (the mother's running away) necessary for the future state to come about. We need some physical link between the activity and the future state that explains the activity (or 'causes' it).
A similar problem arises in conventional physics. I alluded to this in mentioning the lead sulphide precipitate. For another physics' perspective, let us consider a rock on a hillside that is restrained from rolling down to the valley floor by a wedge. If we move the wedge, the rock rolls down to the bottom and achieves a state of minimum energy. Looking at this from outside the rock/valley system, we explain the rock's activity (the rolling) by the existence of the valley. If the valley didn't exist it wouldn't cause the rock to roll into it. We explain infinitesimal movements of the rock on the way down the hill in like manner. Reduced energy is achieved by infinitesimal movements of the rock, and that's why they occur. Logically, these explanations of the rock's activity proceed from a desirable future state of the world (a state of reduced energy) to earlier activities that cause the desirable state to occur. Since we don't like backward-acting causes, we invent a 'field' (in this case, the gravitational field) to take over the causation role. We now say that the rock moves because it is caused to do so by a gravitational field. This field acts in the present and, superficially at least, avoids backward-in-time causation. In the case of animals, the problem is to identify a suitable field to take a role similar to that of the gravitational field. This unknown field will 'cause' the animals' behaviour. It will be the link from the future gene molecules to the activity that results in the existence of the gene molecules. If we can't find a suitable field, we are stuck with backward causation.
Evolution theorists have been reluctant to look for such a field. They are wary of 'teleological' (goal-directed) explanations of life, which were rampant before the time of Charles Darwin. Perhaps sensing that a consideration of animal behaviour in terms of physics leads to this uncomfortable question, evolution theorists today are reluctant to even consider physical explanations of animal behaviour. They content themselves with the soft biological explanation that says animals have to act the way they act because if they didn't they wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be asking questions about it! Even if that statement had any content, it assumes animals have the ability to 'act'; and if we assume that, we will never explain it.
In terms of the theory on this site, the linking 'field' is belief. All objects in the world conform to a logically coherent whole, where the logic now includes belief. The reason that animals engage in the behaviour that they do is simply because they are believed to be the sort of object that has that characteristic! Effectively, they are defined to be the sort of thing that they are, and therefore they are obliged to do the things they do. Backward causation is not a problem because belief acts from outside time.
As an explanation of animal behaviour, this new scheme might not seem much of an improvement on the old one. But it is better for the following reasons: (a) it avoids assuming that animals have the ability to act i.e., that they have rudimentary free will; (b) it avoids the backward causation inherent in the idea that future genes cause present activity; (c) it is scientific in that the subjectivity it makes use of, i.e., belief, has been given accommodation within science (the old scheme used subjective language without accommodation); and (d) it is possible that the belief 'field' has already been identified by science (as earlier described, Ref. 8).
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