[From Bill Powers (971105.0100 MST)]
Gary Cziko 971105.0258 GMT --
I am open to the possibility of a PCT account of evolution, but I don't see
how that wouldn't change the necessity that structures and behaviors be
adapted to the environment in order for individuals and species to survive.
To say "in order to survive" makes survival into a reference signal. I
doubt that it is. The result of controlling for certain variables like
procreation, keeping warm, keeping fed, feeding and protecting the young
and each other, and so on is that the organism and its species survive. If
any of these variables fails to remain under control, the species succumbs.
Survival is a result of good control, not the cause of good control.
Nothing that organisms do or evolve to do can be explained by saying that
the result is better fitness. To say that is to omit asking the real
question, which is how organisms can so consistently change so as to
improve their control specifically so they can _resist_ "selection pressures."
I think that natural selection is used as an explanation in the same way
that reinforcement is used. If you ask a Skinnerian to explain the way
Einstein arrived at E = MC^2, the only answer he can give is that Einstein
must have been reinforced for producing the behaviors that led him to write
that expression. This tells us, of course, exactly nothing about how to get
from
F = MA to E = MC^2.
For reinforcement, substitute natural selection and you have no more
convincing an explanation. Did Einstein simply emit one equation after
another at random until one of them proved viable? Will 50 million monkeys
ever type War And Peace? Does the Pope say Mass in red suspenders?
Received wisdom says that the fossil record and contemporary observations
prove that natural selection is enough to create the apparently systematic
variations in forms that we observe or infer. But that is merely using the
conclusion as a proof of the premise (the same, naturally, goes for the
explanations of creation science). The changes we observe could be coming
about in some entirely different way. If you propose that squirrels on a
treadmill are what make cars move, you can't prove that hypothesis by
pointing to the fact that cars move. To prove the hypothesis you have to
lift the hood, or bonnet, and demonstrate that the squirrels and the
treadmill are there, and that the treadmill is geared to the wheels, and
that there is no other engine.
This hasn't been done for the theories of reinforcement or natural
selection. I doubt that it can be done. These are intellectually plausible
theories, but they could be dead wrong. You can't even start looking for
alternative explanations until you understand that the existing theories
could actually be incorrect.
I think that fitness, defined as reproductive success, is a red herring.
There is certainly a lower limit of fitness below which a species can't
survive, or compete effectively, but there is also an upper limit. Even
without competition, no species can live in its own waste products or
reproduce faster than resources can be renewed or discovered.
Over-reproduction is just as deleterious to control as under-reproduction.
The organisms that have the greatest control over the environment's effects
on them are not the most numerous, not by factors of thousands.
Reproductive success is just another variable among many that must be
controlled to keep living systems free from control by their environments.
The basic goal is not survival, but control.
You can think of living systems as if they were a single organism that we
call Life. This organism can change anything that results in more
independence from environmental influences, changing not only the external
environment but its own form. The multitudinous forms we see simply
represent the uncountable solutions to maintaining control in almost any
imaginable enironment. We're seeing the same basic organism under different
conditions, controlling what happens to it by whatever means works.
Best,
Bill P.