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There's a difference between the physical laws (that we know) and the "domain of physics". There's a great deal we don't yet know about physics that's neverthel

There's a difference between the physical laws (that we know) and the "domain of physics". There's a great deal we don't yet know about physics that's nevertheless within its domain. Not everything is in the domain of physics. "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" is not in the domain of physics. However, physics (or its subsets chemistry and biology) can explain how life may have emerged. Physics can't rule out that a god snapped his godfingers 5000 years ago and made it all appear the way that it does now. It can't rule out an immortal soul. It can't rule out that we're in a simulation, or that unobservable fairies are actually behind all the forces in the universe. For those cases, I like to apply Occam's Razor - not because it's true, but because it's practical. > And as you point out, the notion that Darwinian mechanisms can account for evolution of complexity and diversity is pure speculation. Random mutation and natural selection do result in complexity and diversity. This is a fact, not speculation. You can try it at home, on your computer. We do have genetic algorithms working on those exact principles. They're generally not preferable to more informed algorithms, because they're slow, but they do work. > It uses mechanisms that we can see operating in the lab and in bioinformatics, such as bacterial horizontal gene transfer and empirically calculated substitution matrices. And the further that bioinformatic algorithms diverge from Darwin's ideas, the better they perform. As we can see from computer simulation, pure selection and mutation is inefficient. If nature can find a shortcut mechanism that "Darwinian evolution" itself does not account for, it's not surprising that it would become a dominating factor. However, what makes you believe that such a mechanism itself could not possibly arise from natural selection and random mutation? Is it the improbability? It's a big universe, you know. We're not even talking about the probability of this happening on all planets, but on any planet in the universe.

yters 7y ago
I think you are missing my point. Physical phenomena are not reducible to physical laws, and cannot be explained by the laws. You cannot derive a binary adder from the laws of electricity, and that is why computer engineering is not a field of physics, but is its own domain with its own set of laws. As for Darwin's mechanisms, I'm not speaking from personal incredulity, but from what I see reading bioinformatics textbooks and what leading biologists write, not what we are taught in high school. Darwin's mechanisms are only given lip service, and when the rubber meets the road in practice they are completely ignored.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > I think you are missing my point. Physical phenomena are not reducible to physical laws, and cannot be explained by the laws. You cannot derive a binary adder from the laws of electricity, and that is why computer engineering is not a field of physics, but is its own domain with its own set of laws. Fair enough, let's just leave it at that. > As for Darwin's mechanisms, I'm not speaking from personal incredulity, but from what I see reading bioinformatics textbooks and what leading biologists write, not what we are taught in high school. Darwin's mechanisms are only given lip service, and when the rubber meets the road in practice they are completely ignored. Okay, I've done some googling. Now let me take a shot at reconstructing what happened here. You read that one paper[1] that quite boldly claims that the CRISPR mechanism proves that Lamarckism is real. You stumbled upon it because it appeared to confirm something that you already wanted to believe: "Darwinism is wrong". You otherwise have no background in bioinformatics. The thing is, that paper doesn't prove Darwin wrong at all - he never ruled out other effects besides random mutation and selection. Darwin just wasn't very fond of Lamarck's work, which wasn't very scientific even by the standards of its time. The effects of random mutation and selection have been readily reproduced countless times. Lamarckian effects on the other hand have not been observed until epigenetics (a bit of a stretch), HGT (rather uncommon in eukaryotes like us two) or this here CRISPR (more of a bacteria thing). That's despite lots of experiments that have been performed to prove Lamarckism right. If anything, nature has a lot of obvious Darwinism and maybe some not-so-obvious Lamarckism here and there. To quote the paper: "Neither Lamarck nor Darwin were aware of the mechanisms of emergence and fixation of heritable variation. Therefore, it was relatively easy for Lamarck to entertain the idea that phenotypic variation directly translates into heritable (what we now consider genetic or genomic) changes. We now realize that the strict Lamarckian scenario is extremely demanding in that a molecular mechanism must exist for the effect of a phenotypic change to be channeled into the corresponding modification of the genome (mutation). There seems to be no general mechanisms for such reverse genome engineering and it is not unreasonable to surmise that genomes are actually protected from this type of mutation." Personally, I actually find the prospect of Lamarckian effects in the evolution of "higher" species exciting and plausible. It's not exactly a proven thing that this is common in nature, as you seem to believe.
  - 7y ago

yters 7y ago

I think you are missing my point. Physical phenomena are not reducible to physical laws, and cannot be explained by the laws. You cannot derive a binary adder from the laws of electricity, and that is why computer engineering is not a field of physics, but is its own domain with its own set of laws. As for Darwin's mechanisms, I'm not speaking from personal incredulity, but from what I see reading bioinformatics textbooks and what leading biologists write, not what we are taught in high school. Darwin's mechanisms are only given lip service, and when the rubber meets the road in practice they are completely ignored.

gridlockd 7y ago
> I think you are missing my point. Physical phenomena are not reducible to physical laws, and cannot be explained by the laws. You cannot derive a binary adder from the laws of electricity, and that is why computer engineering is not a field of physics, but is its own domain with its own set of laws. Fair enough, let's just leave it at that. > As for Darwin's mechanisms, I'm not speaking from personal incredulity, but from what I see reading bioinformatics textbooks and what leading biologists write, not what we are taught in high school. Darwin's mechanisms are only given lip service, and when the rubber meets the road in practice they are completely ignored. Okay, I've done some googling. Now let me take a shot at reconstructing what happened here. You read that one paper[1] that quite boldly claims that the CRISPR mechanism proves that Lamarckism is real. You stumbled upon it because it appeared to confirm something that you already wanted to believe: "Darwinism is wrong". You otherwise have no background in bioinformatics. The thing is, that paper doesn't prove Darwin wrong at all - he never ruled out other effects besides random mutation and selection. Darwin just wasn't very fond of Lamarck's work, which wasn't very scientific even by the standards of its time. The effects of random mutation and selection have been readily reproduced countless times. Lamarckian effects on the other hand have not been observed until epigenetics (a bit of a stretch), HGT (rather uncommon in eukaryotes like us two) or this here CRISPR (more of a bacteria thing). That's despite lots of experiments that have been performed to prove Lamarckism right. If anything, nature has a lot of obvious Darwinism and maybe some not-so-obvious Lamarckism here and there. To quote the paper: "Neither Lamarck nor Darwin were aware of the mechanisms of emergence and fixation of heritable variation. Therefore, it was relatively easy for Lamarck to entertain the idea that phenotypic variation directly translates into heritable (what we now consider genetic or genomic) changes. We now realize that the strict Lamarckian scenario is extremely demanding in that a molecular mechanism must exist for the effect of a phenotypic change to be channeled into the corresponding modification of the genome (mutation). There seems to be no general mechanisms for such reverse genome engineering and it is not unreasonable to surmise that genomes are actually protected from this type of mutation." Personally, I actually find the prospect of Lamarckian effects in the evolution of "higher" species exciting and plausible. It's not exactly a proven thing that this is common in nature, as you seem to believe.
- 7y ago