Saturday, December 01, 2007
Adaptation
Dawkins criticizes the adaptationist theory
Here I try to quote Dawkins in his book “The extended phenotype“, about the nonsense of asking a question about the significance of behavior in an artificial world, because adoption and contraception, reading and mathematics are products of an animal living in completely different environment from the one in which its genes were selected. This is not exact quotation, but I hope to have interpreted Dawkin’s idea correctly.
Let’s start with adoption. Adoption is not purely human trait; many animals do adopt offspring of somebody else of the same kin. Some animals are even capable of adopting and rearing totally foreign offspring. But some other animals behave completely the opposite way. A lion kills usually all the offspring of the lion who was the lead of harem of lionesses before. Here the explanation goes by selfish genes. He does not want to have competitors for his own future offspring. So we can see that there are three basic approaches in nature how to behave, one way is to take care of the any living creature, the second is to take care only of the offspring of one’s own kin and the third is to kill all the offspring except one’s own. Most probably the reason for different behavior will be given by different positions in the environment hierarchy. Sometimes it seems to pay off to take care of any living creature, sometimes only of one’s own kin and sometimes it can be advantageous to kill all offspring with the exception of one’s own.
Why do humans adopt other people’s children or just take care of them? Most probably the same reasoning can be used. People just belong to that sort of animals that prefer to take care of the offspring of one’s own kin and sometimes even of all living creatures. Humans do it because of selfish genes. It can be of advantage to take care of somebody’s child, because his genes are closely related to mine compared to the genes of a lion, or a mouse, or a fruit fly, and thus I can help to preserve the wide kin, the human race as such, compared to all other living creatures.
Now it is necessary to discuss the adaptationist theory. What is adaptation? Adaptation is often explained as a way of getting adapted to something. Well, nice explanation but it says nothing. Sometimes people like Dawkins try to explain adaptations as the result of random gene mutations, where the mutation remained that proved advantageous. I think that adaptation can be explained in a much better way than only by try and error of genes. I do not want to count how many mutations could be possible by such a complex organism as humans are. I do not believe that the time the Earth exists is long enough to go through all the possible mutations.
Anything that “approves” as adaptation is mostly only reaction to the specific environmental signals, condition in which the given organism lives. But how can some organism know that some specific reaction is a good one. Well, this happens by try and error. That reaction that yields the best outcome will be repeated many times as all the organism of the same kin will adopt it via, say, imitation and copying. If such reaction is repeated many times then if becomes stored as useful information in DNA. The storing of such information in DNA is the question of energy. If some incentive, some environmental signal is repeated many times and there is already a reasonable response to it, then, it makes sense to pass this information to the offspring so that it does not have to go the whole try and error way again. It just saves energy, because it is too costly to let every new offspring to test the same signal anew from scratch. It saves energy to equip the offspring with the necessary information.
What Dawkins means by artificial world is the world created by humans, the way how fast humans are changing their environment and adjusting it to there present needs, and by doing so they also change the environment of many animals. But this cannot be considered artificial. If we would consider changing environment to one’s own needs as artificial then many other animals would be also “guilty” of creating artificial world. It is not only humans who change their environment. The only truth about humans and their changing their environment is the speed with which this happens, and how fast we change what we have change quite recently. Now the problem is not the speed of change as such but the problem of adapting to these changes. That means the system that has been developed over sever hundred million years now shows malfunctions because the system of adapting is slower than the changes.
Why is it so? Every organism must be able somehow decide whether some signal from the outside world is important or not. But how can a simple organism do this? The answer is extremely easy. Every signal that repeats many times is important. The level of importance is given by the number of repetitions of that particular signal. One can see that all over the world, in all animals and in humans as well.
Let’s mention few examples of how repetition postulates the level of importance. One such activity can be car driving. If you compare a car driver with a lot of experience, many hundred thousand kilometers driven, at different conditions, fast and slow speed on one side and on the other side you take a driver who drives only on Sundays to the church and only in summer, you will find that the first driver is much better driver. It is so because he was more often exposed to the activity of driving, it repeated many more times and so he is more skilled, better adapted to this environmental signal. By environmental signals here I mean all the signals that are necessary to be processed when driving a car, that means reading all the traffic signs, being able to make fast decisions on crossroads, also being able analyze different situations and high speed, because normally humans move only on feet, and the speed of information approaching us is about six kilometers an hour, while driving a car on German autobahns, the speed with which information flies towards you can be as fast as 200 kilometers an hour. The difference is remarkable, and need some time to get used to it.
Examples of the same value are all activities that we learn and by learning we get better. Learning actually means nothing else but repetition. Take languages for example, we have two sorts of languages, mother tongue and foreign languages. The difference is the time when it is trained and how often it is trained, that means when and how many repetitions have been made. If you are born as a one-language child, then, you spend a lot of time only with this single language. Then when you go to school you may have some foreign language classes there, but the amount of time you are exposed to these foreign language is extremely short compared to the time you use your mother tongue. From the evolutionary point of view also the time when you are exposed to the second language are of real importance as discovered by scientists. Human brain is open to language training only in specific times when the owner of this brain is young and growing. Usually the best time is the time after the birth, then there are several “time windows” when the brain is open again to learning foreign language. Whatever you try to learn after your 18th year of life is a hard job as the brain has already got hardwired and it is really energy consuming to readjust this hardwiring, but it is possible. But again the basic principle of adapting to new conditions, say, caused by migration from one language group to the other, is only the number of repetition. It is much easier to learn a foreign language if you are living in the other country than it is when you try to study a language at your home country.
As next I would like to show that the same principle is valid also in sports and games, and in all other activities. Just imagine you try to play basketball, soccer, golf, ice-hockey, volleyball, or high jump, swimming weight-lifting, box, shooting and really all activities, even typing on a typewriter or a pc is such an activity, as well as cooking, wood hacking and dancing. Whatever other activity you can only think of is subject to this principle of repetition.
There is still one extremely important problem to which I try to give some kind of explanation. First, how can organism differentiate between different signals and different responses, and second, where and how is this information stored.
I would like to suggest here that every organism depending on its own level of evolutionary development has several levels where it can store the needed information. A simple organism might have only one, two or three such levels, more complex organisms, like humans, for example, might have many more levels in which they store all the needed information. The levels of storing information correspond with the level of importance of such information. How can organism recognize whether some particular information is of high or low importance according to which it can store it in corresponding level of storage system? The answer appears to me to be obvious. It is the number of repetitions. If there is some information perceived for the first time, organism stores such information at the very lowest level, and only for relatively short time. It costs energy to have useless information stored. So if this information does not repeat in some reasonable time, it gets deleted, and some new information is stored for the first time. If such information keeps repeating, organism knows that it is getting important and shifts the already stored information into the higher level of storing. This has two impacts, first it might be already passed over to the next generation, and it is not so easy to delete this information, first it would have to degrade back to the first level again. If such information keeps still repeated it might be shifted into much higher levels of storing system, and most probably genes are at the last and highest level of storing information. Information stored in genes is information of highest importance, therefore there are hardly changes permitted. Humans do not have usually four legs, but two legs and two arms.
Now the next problem how is the information stored? It is stored by a chemical coding in DNA. And because DNA is a chemical system it can be disturbed by other chemicals, just recall the problems in Germany many years ago with the medicament called Contagarn. This chemical caused in the 1960’s many deformations in newly born when their mothers took this medicament. The substances in the medicament, for some reason, were capable of destroying the information in DNA, and thus cause the phenotypic effect of bodily malformations.
The problem here is the way of coding of information in DNA. It happens in a chemical way, and maybe even one level below, at the subatomic level, where then nanotechnology and quantum mechanics should be used to solve the problem of how the information is really coded and stored. It can be that only chemical links represent one certain level of coding and storing information and subatomic forces, nano-scale formations and quantum mechanics might be responsible for some other level of storing information in DNA.
So the whole problem of adaptation can be driven down to the level of perceiving, storing and passing this information to the next generations. This in turn can be driven down to the number of repetitions of certain signal or information broadcasted by the environment of some organism. Adaptation is therefore only a way of getting used to information or signals that appear very often and getting rid of information that occurs only rarely.
Here I try to quote Dawkins in his book “The extended phenotype“, about the nonsense of asking a question about the significance of behavior in an artificial world, because adoption and contraception, reading and mathematics are products of an animal living in completely different environment from the one in which its genes were selected. This is not exact quotation, but I hope to have interpreted Dawkin’s idea correctly.
Let’s start with adoption. Adoption is not purely human trait; many animals do adopt offspring of somebody else of the same kin. Some animals are even capable of adopting and rearing totally foreign offspring. But some other animals behave completely the opposite way. A lion kills usually all the offspring of the lion who was the lead of harem of lionesses before. Here the explanation goes by selfish genes. He does not want to have competitors for his own future offspring. So we can see that there are three basic approaches in nature how to behave, one way is to take care of the any living creature, the second is to take care only of the offspring of one’s own kin and the third is to kill all the offspring except one’s own. Most probably the reason for different behavior will be given by different positions in the environment hierarchy. Sometimes it seems to pay off to take care of any living creature, sometimes only of one’s own kin and sometimes it can be advantageous to kill all offspring with the exception of one’s own.
Why do humans adopt other people’s children or just take care of them? Most probably the same reasoning can be used. People just belong to that sort of animals that prefer to take care of the offspring of one’s own kin and sometimes even of all living creatures. Humans do it because of selfish genes. It can be of advantage to take care of somebody’s child, because his genes are closely related to mine compared to the genes of a lion, or a mouse, or a fruit fly, and thus I can help to preserve the wide kin, the human race as such, compared to all other living creatures.
Now it is necessary to discuss the adaptationist theory. What is adaptation? Adaptation is often explained as a way of getting adapted to something. Well, nice explanation but it says nothing. Sometimes people like Dawkins try to explain adaptations as the result of random gene mutations, where the mutation remained that proved advantageous. I think that adaptation can be explained in a much better way than only by try and error of genes. I do not want to count how many mutations could be possible by such a complex organism as humans are. I do not believe that the time the Earth exists is long enough to go through all the possible mutations.
Anything that “approves” as adaptation is mostly only reaction to the specific environmental signals, condition in which the given organism lives. But how can some organism know that some specific reaction is a good one. Well, this happens by try and error. That reaction that yields the best outcome will be repeated many times as all the organism of the same kin will adopt it via, say, imitation and copying. If such reaction is repeated many times then if becomes stored as useful information in DNA. The storing of such information in DNA is the question of energy. If some incentive, some environmental signal is repeated many times and there is already a reasonable response to it, then, it makes sense to pass this information to the offspring so that it does not have to go the whole try and error way again. It just saves energy, because it is too costly to let every new offspring to test the same signal anew from scratch. It saves energy to equip the offspring with the necessary information.
What Dawkins means by artificial world is the world created by humans, the way how fast humans are changing their environment and adjusting it to there present needs, and by doing so they also change the environment of many animals. But this cannot be considered artificial. If we would consider changing environment to one’s own needs as artificial then many other animals would be also “guilty” of creating artificial world. It is not only humans who change their environment. The only truth about humans and their changing their environment is the speed with which this happens, and how fast we change what we have change quite recently. Now the problem is not the speed of change as such but the problem of adapting to these changes. That means the system that has been developed over sever hundred million years now shows malfunctions because the system of adapting is slower than the changes.
Why is it so? Every organism must be able somehow decide whether some signal from the outside world is important or not. But how can a simple organism do this? The answer is extremely easy. Every signal that repeats many times is important. The level of importance is given by the number of repetitions of that particular signal. One can see that all over the world, in all animals and in humans as well.
Let’s mention few examples of how repetition postulates the level of importance. One such activity can be car driving. If you compare a car driver with a lot of experience, many hundred thousand kilometers driven, at different conditions, fast and slow speed on one side and on the other side you take a driver who drives only on Sundays to the church and only in summer, you will find that the first driver is much better driver. It is so because he was more often exposed to the activity of driving, it repeated many more times and so he is more skilled, better adapted to this environmental signal. By environmental signals here I mean all the signals that are necessary to be processed when driving a car, that means reading all the traffic signs, being able to make fast decisions on crossroads, also being able analyze different situations and high speed, because normally humans move only on feet, and the speed of information approaching us is about six kilometers an hour, while driving a car on German autobahns, the speed with which information flies towards you can be as fast as 200 kilometers an hour. The difference is remarkable, and need some time to get used to it.
Examples of the same value are all activities that we learn and by learning we get better. Learning actually means nothing else but repetition. Take languages for example, we have two sorts of languages, mother tongue and foreign languages. The difference is the time when it is trained and how often it is trained, that means when and how many repetitions have been made. If you are born as a one-language child, then, you spend a lot of time only with this single language. Then when you go to school you may have some foreign language classes there, but the amount of time you are exposed to these foreign language is extremely short compared to the time you use your mother tongue. From the evolutionary point of view also the time when you are exposed to the second language are of real importance as discovered by scientists. Human brain is open to language training only in specific times when the owner of this brain is young and growing. Usually the best time is the time after the birth, then there are several “time windows” when the brain is open again to learning foreign language. Whatever you try to learn after your 18th year of life is a hard job as the brain has already got hardwired and it is really energy consuming to readjust this hardwiring, but it is possible. But again the basic principle of adapting to new conditions, say, caused by migration from one language group to the other, is only the number of repetition. It is much easier to learn a foreign language if you are living in the other country than it is when you try to study a language at your home country.
As next I would like to show that the same principle is valid also in sports and games, and in all other activities. Just imagine you try to play basketball, soccer, golf, ice-hockey, volleyball, or high jump, swimming weight-lifting, box, shooting and really all activities, even typing on a typewriter or a pc is such an activity, as well as cooking, wood hacking and dancing. Whatever other activity you can only think of is subject to this principle of repetition.
There is still one extremely important problem to which I try to give some kind of explanation. First, how can organism differentiate between different signals and different responses, and second, where and how is this information stored.
I would like to suggest here that every organism depending on its own level of evolutionary development has several levels where it can store the needed information. A simple organism might have only one, two or three such levels, more complex organisms, like humans, for example, might have many more levels in which they store all the needed information. The levels of storing information correspond with the level of importance of such information. How can organism recognize whether some particular information is of high or low importance according to which it can store it in corresponding level of storage system? The answer appears to me to be obvious. It is the number of repetitions. If there is some information perceived for the first time, organism stores such information at the very lowest level, and only for relatively short time. It costs energy to have useless information stored. So if this information does not repeat in some reasonable time, it gets deleted, and some new information is stored for the first time. If such information keeps repeating, organism knows that it is getting important and shifts the already stored information into the higher level of storing. This has two impacts, first it might be already passed over to the next generation, and it is not so easy to delete this information, first it would have to degrade back to the first level again. If such information keeps still repeated it might be shifted into much higher levels of storing system, and most probably genes are at the last and highest level of storing information. Information stored in genes is information of highest importance, therefore there are hardly changes permitted. Humans do not have usually four legs, but two legs and two arms.
Now the next problem how is the information stored? It is stored by a chemical coding in DNA. And because DNA is a chemical system it can be disturbed by other chemicals, just recall the problems in Germany many years ago with the medicament called Contagarn. This chemical caused in the 1960’s many deformations in newly born when their mothers took this medicament. The substances in the medicament, for some reason, were capable of destroying the information in DNA, and thus cause the phenotypic effect of bodily malformations.
The problem here is the way of coding of information in DNA. It happens in a chemical way, and maybe even one level below, at the subatomic level, where then nanotechnology and quantum mechanics should be used to solve the problem of how the information is really coded and stored. It can be that only chemical links represent one certain level of coding and storing information and subatomic forces, nano-scale formations and quantum mechanics might be responsible for some other level of storing information in DNA.
So the whole problem of adaptation can be driven down to the level of perceiving, storing and passing this information to the next generations. This in turn can be driven down to the number of repetitions of certain signal or information broadcasted by the environment of some organism. Adaptation is therefore only a way of getting used to information or signals that appear very often and getting rid of information that occurs only rarely.
# posted by Dalibor @ 4:05 AM 
