Clarification of the limits to self organisation
In the couple of weeks since I posted a summary of my work on self organisation, I’ve been hoping to receive criticism – none so far unfortunately. However, by trawling the web I did find some anonymous comments. While these were mostly of low quality, some recurrent objections have made me want to clarify a couple of points.
Clarification #1 “Quantheory”, a grad student in physics, criticises the applicability of the results to evolution. He writes:
“… evolution is not described by the search for one specific target. Rather, there is a large range of living things that can exist in many different environments”.
Of course this is true. Nevertheless it doesn’t contradict anything I say in my paper. I’m examining the claim that living organisms (more generally, large and irregular objects) can self organise. The number of possible living organisms simply isn’t relevant to this question, and so isn’t considered in the paper. Recall that a self-organising object is strongly preferred by the dynamics, so that it appears much more quickly and probably than it would in a purely random system.
The author may be suggesting that evolution isn’t a case of self organisation, after all. Perhaps there are so many possible kinds of life that some kinds at least are likely to have emerged even by pure chance, given a few billion years? I hope s/he is not, for this notion is ridiculous, as for example Richard Dawkins has pointed out:
“It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living – flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on. But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.”
(R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 9) Read More ›