Evolution

Don't worry genetic engineering will fix it

Evolution is central to the scientific creation story. Understanding how evolution works is a necessary prerequisite to a working understanding of the scientific universe.

"We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution." -Carl Sagan

To see how major evolutionary milestones are inevitable, even as the particular form they take is variable, and how this applies to religion, society and other self-organizing systems, see the march of progress.

Everything Evolves

The notion of change over time in response to the environment is part of the universal feedback loop that impacts everything we do. The march of progress is inevitable.

Universal Darwinism describes the way in which evolutionary algorithms can describe the way that many things change over time, not just life. The most famous example is Richard Dawkins "selfish meme" which applies genetic learning to describe the spreading of ideas. There are also similar process at play in quantum mechanics, cosmology, neural network learning, and the field of Big History that applies Darwinian principles to the entire history of the universe.

While Big History sometimes crosses over from science to metaphysics, this is necessary when making universal predictions about the nature of reality. Regardless of whether it is ultimately provable, it still provides a mental framework for a rational universal order that can serve as a scientific god concept or metanarrative of everything.

Why Some People Fail to Understand Evolution

The failure to see how evolution can happen without intelligent design happens due to the lack of understanding one or more specific concepts. Rather than debating the validity of scripture or the existence of the supernatural, it is much more effective to identify the specific gap in knowledge and fill in the necessary prerequisites. These typically boil down to three simple things.

1. No knowledge of self-organizing systems or the principles of complexity
2. Thinks evolution must be gradual when Punctuated Equilibrium is the norm
3. Insists on interpreting scripture literally instead of as allegory

Many who are not fundamentalists still believe in intelligent design because they don't understand #1 or #2. Addressing these basic facts can change the perspective from "god used divine intervention to create intelligent life" to "god used evolution to create intelligent life". Despite the presence of the word god, the second statement is no longer in conflict with scientific observability.

If only theological arguments are acceptable to someone, then this list of statements from religious organizations in support of evolution will likely be more persuasive.

Fractals Help You Understand Evolution

Although the principles of self-organizing systems are not typically taught in biology classes and are not a prerequisite for understanding evolution, it can really bridge the knowledge gap for people who can't grasp complex order arising from randomness.

A common metaphor used by creationists is a tornado blowing through a junkyard and building a house.[1] Given the huge number of improbable events that led to the evolution of intelligent life, it seems like the overall probability of either event would be similar. But a more appropriate metaphor would be a billion tornados blowing through a junkyard, and every time it gets a step closer to building a house, that part remains. Most tornados do nothing useful, but every once in a while one leaves a board in just the right place or drives a useful nail. After billions of tornados, you will eventually construct a house.

Fractals help bridge this gap in understanding and allow anyone to see how complex order can arise from simple, random processes over time.

• Life is based on self-replication. This is meta principle of feedback loops, recursion, fractals, etc.
• Fractals have infinite complexity, amazing symmetry and patterns, but come from simple equations repeated billions and billions of times. Evolution is the simple principle of replication and survival repeated over billions of generations.
• Living systems use fractal patterns to create complex structures like our nervous and circulatory systems, or the structure of trees, with simple patterns, repeated.
• DNA is like the generating equation for an organism. Like a fractal, small changes in the generating equation create significantly different patterns once the calculation has been performed billions of times. This explains why we share so much common DNA with our ancestors, and how a few random mutations can create a new species.
• Fractal geometry is the mathematics of growth and natural systems. Euclidean geometry is the mathematics of the man made. When Euclidean geometry is all you know, living systems appear impossibly complicated and could only be the result of design by a much higher intelligence. Once fractal geometry is learned, and the underlying simplicity of living systems is revealed, the evolution of intelligent life becomes an inevitability instead of a one in a quintillion random accident.

Punctuated Equilibrium

The concept of Punctuated Equilibrium is also an important prerequisite to the understanding of evolution. The natural tendency is to assume that change over time is gradual and consistent, which would produce a large number of transition fossils that clearly show how one species becomes another. However, this is not what we see in the fossil record, causing creationists to point to this as evidence against evolution.

Understanding Punctuated Equilibrium solves the cognitive dissonance caused by the lack of transition fossils and makes the acceptance of the reality of evolution much easier.

A favorite allegory for this process is a boulder in a river. The boulder might stay lodged tightly against some other rocks for thousands of years, when finally the water erodes a gap just big enough to dislodge it. At that point it may tumble and stop and tumble and stop many times over the next few days or years until it reaches another stable point where it will stay for the next thousand years. Punctuated Equilibrium is the same principle applied to evolution.

Process of Evolution: Gradualism versus Punctuated Equilibrium

What is Life?

Evolution is the process that created life, but the question of what exactly separates living matter from the non-living is one that scientists and philosophers have struggled with forever.

The book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence examines this question using the latest theoretical models and proposes a framework for distinguishing natural, artificial, or alien life from the non-living. Maria Popova's review in the Marginalian gives a good overview of the considerations.

Evolutionary Psychology

The field of Evolutionary Psychology expanded on its roots in Sociobiology in order to provide broad generalizations and speculations about the survival benefits of various human behavior in order to justify it as "natural." The idea that most of our instincts and tendencies must have some evolutionary survival benefit is just common sense. Working backwards from current observations to speculate about ancient survival benefits is bad science. This is especially the case when these speculations are used to justify discrimination and natural hierarchies.

The metaculture wiki avoids this type of backwards reasoning by focusing on the needs of the brain over the needs of our DNA. The brain seeks happiness, so our focus should be on creating a culture that celebrates happiness, not one with a slavish devotion to self-replication. See Quality of life versus quantity of life.

Some articles discussing the criticisms of evolutionary psychology, with progressively increasing levels of hostility.

• Criticism of Evolutionary Psychology
• How Valid Is Evolutionary Psychology?
• Is Evolutionary Psychology Total, Utter, and Dangerous Bullshit?

Evolution, Not Revolution

It is not practical nor desirable to tear down the institutions of an advanced society and attempt to rebuild them from scratch using some ideological or utopian model. Social change should be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Sticky Wiki Evolution

The wiki format allows for an evolutionary self-organization process to be used to develop metaculture.

Part of the way evolution works is that beneficial adaptations are "sticky" in that once they are in place they tend to stay there. Benign or harmful mutations aren't sticky--they appear but don't tend to stay in the gene pool for very long since there is no survival incentive.

Memes work the same way in the culture. Really useful or persuasive concepts are sticky and tend to stay in the collective consciousness for a long time. The best, most useful ideas, like those of Socrates, Jesus, and Newton, will probably stick around forever.

There is little stickiness for the ideas flowing through social media newsfeeds, new scientific research announcements, book tour podcasts, and all the other information flowing through our brains thanks to the information overload of the Internet age. What happens to the good ones? Most of the time they are flushed down the memory hole along with 99.99% of the other crap that appears on any given newsfeed.

What happens to the good ideas we have in conversations with others, or in organized philosophical discussion groups where the whole point is to create new ideas? Where to they go? What if someone in your group came up with the perfect, most hilariously apt analogy to explain a complex concept and you want to share it?

With the help of the wiki, you can make these ideas sticky!

By taking the best ideas from the cultural milieu and integrating them into a holistic metanarrative, each iteration reveals a more complex and accurate pattern describing reality. Older ideas may get disproven or fall out of fashion and lose their persuasive power, and those memes will disappear. This process mimics evolution.

Doing this will create a resource where anyone can go to catch up on the zeitgeist without having to wade through a mountain of crap on social media every day. It provides a fractal framework for understanding that provides a consistent metanarrative, while incorporating the latest and greatest (or worst) ideas that people need to be aware of to successfully navigate modern capitalism and avoid grift.

The Ascent of Man

The classic BBC series from Jacob Bronowski depicts the evolution of early humans and culture. While some of the science and cultural viewpoints may be dated, it harkens back to the golden age of the educational docuseries. The early Pink Floyd soundtrack slaps, too, though that's probably why most of the episodes are not available. While the full series is not available anywhere currently, this playlist has several episodes as well as some interesting interviews.

The Ascent of Man with Jacob Bronowski

Evolution of Music

Every so often there comes a musician that mutates a new sound. And if that sound is groovy, it will be successful and other musicians will copy it. If the new sound is truly unique and groovy, a new genre has evolved.

Pearl Jam - Do the Evolution

Sabrina Carpenter - Thumbs

Korn - Evolution

Mo'Kalamity - Evolution