Minutus

Dear Venkat,

Grant Bentley has written a book called Soul and Survival. The part on soul sounds a lot like Hinduism (p. 47). He didn't actually know about Hinduism when he wrote it. He was giving a lecture on his book to his wife's yoga class when he found out from the yoga students that actually he is Hindu. Anyway, most of the book is an argument concerning the homeopathic notion of miasm applied to the evolution of human culture. It is a direct discussion of Darwinism although Darwin is not mentioned in the book. It is written for the general public so you have to get the miasm aspect from his other book, Appearance and Circumstance. That book has nothing to do with discussion of the soul. In S&S, he describes the survival instinct as not necessarily animal only, but also as human. What is added to the human (and probably the animal to perhaps a lesser extent or it is not as important to survival as you say) is the soul.

I think you will like his perspective. There is a lot more to it than what the publishers allowed him to keep in the books. In February, I am going to take a telephone course with him. I have been having excellent results using his miasm method. Sometimes I have to get help from him though. Part of the reason for that success is his research on miasms which includes the healthy aspects of patients. So miasm does not equal pathology. Miasm includes soul and instinct. Out of balance, the patient becomes pathological. In health or illness, soul is involved in interplay with instinct. Miasm is basic in health and in illness.

Best,
Ellen

Dear Venkat,
Sivasiva Palani's "The Secret Diary of Charles Darwin" is not quite what it appears to be at first blush. The author gives the clues to what this article actually is, one after another, right here:
"Seeking answers to these queries, I stumbled upon Charles Darwin's lost chronicles and discovered, to my utter astonishment, validation of the Indian TODD theory and a verdict against the TOE. Here then, is an excerpt from the authentically spurious and chimerical diary of the father of the theory of evolution."
If not for the clues, the article would be a massive fraud. But the author, clearly not any sort of historian, stumbled upon Darwin's hitherto undiscovered diary? And this incredibly important discovery is nevertheless still unavailable to anybody else to read? And Darwin went to the trouble to keep a second set of private diaries, and wrote conflicting accounts in the two private sets? And he wrote in such ignorance of his own discoveries? These suggestions are worth a chuckle, but are not worth being hoodwinked by.
Of course, the biggest clue is the one that follows right after that passage: "Charles wrote: 'It is a muggy April first day in 1835.'"
The article was an April Fool's Day hoax, and was probably sent to the editors on 1 April 1991.
If the joke were in any further doubt, it's a matter of historical record (see ) that on 1 April 1835, Darwin was not departing Calcutta but trekking through the Andes, in South America, as far from Calcutta as he could possibly be. And there appears to be no record that the Beagle ever visited any part of India, with or without Charles Darwin.
Neither "apes are our ancestors" nor "the ascent of man from lesser life forms" appears in Darwin's work as contentions that he argued for. Darwin's argument was not that evolution occurs; that was fairly well accepted already by many natural scientists and could be seen in everyday breeding of, for instance, pigeons, cattle, dogs, and many crops. What was at issue was the mechanism of evolution not under artificial control. The spectacularly prolific evidence that Darwin amassed on his Beagle voyage and through his further studies of the evolution of barnacles, pigeons, and other creatures led him, step by step, to what became the inescapably obvious conclusion as to evolution's key mechanisms.
What Darwin came to realise is, fundamentally:
(1) that the traits of the particular members of a species best-adapted to their habitat will lead to greater numbers of their offspring than of others to survive long enough to reproduce;
(2) that there is always resource competition (principally for food and for suitable mates) between members of a species, because populations given unlimited resources always increase exponentially; and
(3) that resources are not unlimited.
These three facts together led him to conclude that once, due to their inheritable traits, some individuals have greater reproductive success than others, natural selection (i.e. differential reproductive success) of those heritable traits will, through the generations, make them increasingly common in that population. (This is the same process that dog breeders have used for thousands of years to create breeds with the traits that they preferred a dog to have.)
When Darwin had to sum up this process in a phrase, he did so not in the practically useless "survival of the fittest" but in the far more descriptive "descent with modification by means of natural selection".
That is of course a mere snippet summary of Darwin's contribution to the understanding of how evolution occurs, and doesn't do justice to the man's genius in perceiving what he did and in overcoming his own religious prejudices to understand it, or to the amount of work he put in to test whether it really explained all that was known about evolution.
Darwin's discovery of the mechanism of evolution is called a theory rather than a hypothesis because there is no doubt (at least, none in the minds of those who've understood how he arrived at his conclusions) that it adequately and most plausibly explains and ties together all the known facts of evolution. Darwin at no point imagined, by the way, that his theory accounted for the beginning of life; only for how it evolves. The individual changes in that process of evolution occur by chance, but the fact of that evolution's direction (e.g. the gradual evolution -- many times over -- of an eye from a light-sensitive patch to an enclosed lensed imaging organ, and the evolution of legs into fins in cetaceans and into wings in dinosaurs) is controlled by the differences each small change makes in the degree of its possessor's adaptedness to his or her habitat.
It's again a matter of historical record that Darwin did not rush home to publish a theory he thought would prove acceptable, some theory that humans descended from apes. (Unlike some today, he was perfectly aware that humans are apes!) Neither did he rush home to publish any nonsense about man's ascent. Rather, he kept his discovery of descent with modification by natural selection fairly quiet for decades, and for at least two very good reasons. One is that, had he publicly shown the evidence for the heresy of the "transmutation of species" upon his return, he might have been executed. Such was the power of religion in a "civilised" country in 1835. Another is that he knew that his wife would be greatly upset by his unambiguous loss of faith in an omnipotent deity's every-sparrowfall control, and he was most reluctant to cause her that hurt.
Cheers!
John
2009/11/2 Venkat >

Hi, Mary Ann --
Good questions! And many thanks for your feedback. Always good to have at least one reader.
"The theory of evolution", since Darwin's time, has come to refer to the Darwinian theory. Other ideas do float around, but they don't have the status of a theory; many are not even hypotheses, as they don't attempt to explain and predict, but merely to explain. The hypothetical components of Darwin's theory each has predictive power: intergenerational differences, exponential population growth, resource limits, resource competition, differential reproductive success. And each predicted outcome of these simple hypotheses is there to confirm.
The greater significance of the theory is that it offers even stronger predictive power than do its components, allowing the prediction of change in population proportions of traits from generation to generation, even to extinction of once-common characteristics in favour of those that have outbred them -- even to the point of such changes that the new population can no longer interbreed with the population it derived from or that spawning population's other founder colonies.
This, of course, is the process of speciation, the creation of new species. And one of the practical results of applying the theory's predictive power is the (non-GM) breeding of new varieties and breeds by selection and interbreeding of stock most strongly exhibiting the characteristics the breeder wishes to emphasise. (In dogs, such a characteristic may be largeness, or smallness, or a propensity for gentleness, or a propensity to exert dominance behaviour or to hunt rats or to point at game or to recognise certain unique smells.)
The theory of electromagnetism too is but a theory. Yet it allowed the prediction of the existence of radio waves, which led to their discovery and the invention of, for instance, radios, television, and microwave transmission.
Not knowing an upper limit to the frequency of electromagnetism did not in any way invalidate the theory. Nor did not knowing that x-rays and cosmic rays existed invalidate it. When we discover a completely different phenomenon of "communication" between two atoms that is faster than light and does not consist of electromagnetic resonance -- such as occurs in quantum entanglement -- the discovery cannot in any invalidate that the theory of electromagnetism is well understood, successful in its predictions, and to that extent fully correct; it simply adds a new thing to be understood in the universe.
Just so is it unnecessary for us to know at exactly what point reproduction of complex molecules became the positive-feedback loop of self-selecting molecules. All the evolutionary change we're able to detect, in vivo or in the fossil record, is explained and can be predicted very nicely by the theory of evolution by descent with modification by means of natural selection: Darwinian evolution. It's clear that even a colony of bacteria, for instance, is subject to the same evolutionary forces as any other organism: in perhaps a hundred generations, possibly far fewer, a large colony of 0.1% penicillin-resistant bacteria will, when faced with the selective force of penicillin, become an equally large colony comprising entirely penicillin-resistant bacteria.
It's almost a given that the first molecules to self-replicate must have done so due to some new or unusual circumstance -- otherwise they wouldn't have been the first. Let's call that luck, or chance. Whether those first ones continued to replicate, or replicated with substitutions (i.e. changes), or simply fizzled out, we cannot know. But it's again almost a given that, at some point, another such first occurred -- and limped into a self-perpetuating process.
Again, it doesn't matter whether it was from the beginning of this that selective forces culled certain molecules in favour of certain others. For all we know, there may be many parallel "colonies" even now of various self-replicating molecules in hot springs, in clay riverbanks, in deep-sea fissures, in volanic calderas. They may be there; they may not. They may replicate using some mechanism tending toward exponential growth in numbers; they may not. They may be subject to selective pressures; they may all coexist without particular competition. What we do know is that all the species of living organisms of which we have any evidence tend to reproduce to outstrip natural resources, and we understand that this by necessity means selection of some over others to survive to reproductive age and selection of some of these over others to have second-generation descendants. Unless all alternative characteristics were equal in reproductive value, all else must follow from these simple observable facts: alteration in population characteristics best adapted to the population's habitat; speciation; even mate choice on the basis of those characteristics that have proven successful.
We evolved into four-limbed apes, and other land mammals evolved into four-limbed whales, not by blind chance but by the competitive pressures of the success of certain design characteristics in particular habitats, tropical and coastal. These pressures made those characteristics increasingly common through the generations and offered further success to exaggeration of most such advantages. In this way did our hind limbs grow significantly longer than those of our forebears while whales' hind limbs grew significantly shorter than their forebears'. And in this way, in various orders of animals, did a complex organ enabling interpretation of easily refractable electromagnetic radiations through lensed imaging -- an eye -- develop four or five times over independently, in small steps, each offering an advantage over the last, from a light-sensitive patch to a patch with some shielding offering directionality, to a pinhole imager, to a lensed imager.
I'm sure it's evident by now that at what point chance took over is not quite the right question. Chance favoured some kind of self-replication and favoured some variations in that replication. Eventually -- and this may have taken minutes or centuries -- that replication outstripped either the sites or the raw materials necessary for all such self-replicative molecules to succeed.
The relevant timing question, if you enjoy watching this kind of thing occur today and understanding it fully, may be at what point the role of chance variation is drowned out by the role of the sheer numbers of that variety in its differential success over others. Chance merely produces a new variety. Its suitability to its habitat in comparison with others determines its success.
Or, if you prefer prehistory, the question may be at what point blind luck became superfluous in kickstarting evolution. Evidently the answer to that question is: very early. Whenever it was that replication with variation commenced, and whether the resource shortages that imposed selective pressures on that process altered replication of simple or complex molecules, both evidently occurred well before creation of all known fossil records.
The date and the stage of replication at which selective pressures began to operate in selecting the relative numbers of replicant variants certainly don't affect the relevance or accuracy of the theory's predictive capabilities concerning all known life. But the transformation from a process of simple replication to one of the natural selection of variants amongst modified replicants would be kind of fun to watch, wouldn't it.
Cheers --
John
2009/11/4 Mary Ann Gilmore >
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"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."

— Plutarch

Hello, Mary Ann --

Thanks for your very kind comments, and for penetrating to the heart of the difficulty. I've responded as best I can to each question, hoping I've shed more light than confusion.
2009/11/5 Mary Ann Gilmore >
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The predictive power of some of the hypotheses that the Darwinian theory ties together can be illustrated in this way:
(a) intergenerational differences
• No offspring of a sexual union is, if you look closely enough, an exact copy of either parent; and even amongst organisms that reproduce asexually, random mutations occur due to background radiation.
(b) exponential population growth
• Take any population of bacteria and give it sufficient suitable growth medium (which may be agar agar, or meat, or something else), water, and room in which to grow, and in a certain period its population will double; after a second such period, it will double again; and after a third, it will double again.
• Take any population of animals or plants free of resource constraints and free of predation, and you will see the same phenomenon. What keeps a population stable is, most commonly, a relatively stable limit on some resource essential to successful reproduction, which may be nesting sites, mates, food, space, or something else.
(c) resource competition
• Beyond replacement of parents (e.g. two offspring to replace two parents), reproductive success is relative. Successful reproduction of just three offspring by two parents in every generation would result in a 25,000-fold increase in population in just 25 generations (the 25th power of 1.5 25 > 25,250). The offspring of just two or three couples would fill most local habitats quite quickly. The offspring of many more would fill them within a few generations. And what then?
What occurs then is that, on average, every mating pair can only replace itself; offspring in excess of what the habitat can support will not live long enough to reproduce, or they will survive at the cost of their parents' or grandparents' earlier demise. One way or another, the exponential tendency of reproduction will be constrained to replacement reproduction and a stable population. This inexorably sets up competition.
(d) differential reproductive success
• With competition established through resource constraints, any trait conferring upon its possessor an advantage over others in reproductive success will lead (if its possessor does not also possess some equally disadvantageous trait) to a slightly greater than average (i.e. replacement, zero-growth) reproductive success of that trait, and others will experience slightly less than average reproductive success. Whatever that trait may be -- say, big muscles or a big smile -- it is advantageous only because it results in greater than average access to resources essential to reproductive success, such as superior senses of smell, balance, or treachery, or others' generosity, lust, or trust.
The breeding of dogs illustrates nicely, if artificially, the process by which natural selection may differentiate members of the formerly one species so much that they become incapable of interbreeding. Dogs have been bred so large and so small that direct interbreeding between the smallest and the largest is physically impossible. We can confirm that the smallest and the largest are members of a single species only by a chain of reproductive successes between animals of intermediate sizes.
Sufficiently prolonged division between two populations of animals or plants has the potential to enable a gradual divergence in habit or signalling behaviour sufficient to make the two populations behaviourally incompatible. Beyond this point, even without further geographic isolation, the two populations will continue to diverge, becaues their newfound habits and behaviours find slight advantages in slightly different habitats and reduce food competition between the populations. Birds that eat one type of seed, for instance, will peck perfectly happily alongside birds of another species that eat a different type of seed, though they will chase away members of their own species.
For any pair of animals or plants to reproduce sexually, a gamete of one must pair, chromosome by chromosome, with a gamete of the other. Increasing divergence between two populations, in habits, signalling, and attraction, eventually reflects differences between their genomes sufficient to render chromosomal pairing between gametes from the two simply impossible. At that point, there is no argument: the two populations can by no stretch be considered populations of the one species.
All this occurs gradually and through several different processes, so the point at which two populations become two species is not necessarily easy to put a finger on. There are four four clearly distinct species of more rat living beneath the Israeli desert, incapable of interbreeding. Yet they look identical -- hairless, blind, and of similar size -- and it would be very easy to mistake them for one species.
The actual likelihood of such apparently unlikely events as an eye's formation by pure chance is causally similar to, and perhaps easier to see in, the actual likelihood of the apparently unlikely construction of a complex protein -- but the protein may be in some ways an easier example to grasp hold of and shake the sense from. So let's look at that.
Any biologist will give the odds of a particular group of atoms' randomly combining into the shape of a certain protein by chance as being vanishingly small. Yet no biologist will see that as an obstacle to the Darwinian theory. To others, this may be paradoxical; but the reasons for a biologist's ability to accept both of those things are overwhelming.
First, there are many, many atoms in what is now the biosphere, involved in a great many chance encounters, often stimulated by the input of significant energies, and this alone accounts for a great many opportunities for even fairly unlikely chance events to occur. Just as the "one in a million" likelihood of Three Mile Island accidents has been found to occur many times over due to the number of reactors and the length of time for which they've been on line, leaving some 10 to the 30 or 10 to 50 atoms lying around on the surface of the Earth to interact for sufficiently long in environments rich in sunlight, lightning, and pounding climatic effects does increase your odds somewhat.
In fact, when, in the 1960s, two scientists, Miller and Urey, mixed together a few substances present in the early Earth's atmosphere -- methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen -- and exposed that mixture to artifical lightning, and found at the end of just one week that amino acids had been produced by it, including glycine and alanine. Other researchers replicated this and even succeeded without lightning, simply using heat. One week!
Second, though a certain element of luck is required in order to generate a range of amino acids by chemical serendipity, the building of a protein from amino acids is not so great a step as to be unimaginable, and I understand that the mechanisms by which amino acids may chain together are fairly simple. Of course, some proteins will be more stable than others, or to exhibit other properties that make them more common. And so it goes. In other words, there's likely to be a type of selective force at work here, favouring certain amino acids and certain combinations of them.
Third, the creation of the majority of proteins (including enzymes) of life as we know it is not dependent upon random interactions as described above; it is instead an emergent property of life itself, and even, preceding life, of chemical factories.
What I mean by this is that once you have some kind of reproducible coordinated chemical factory such a simple precursor to a virus, you have the potential for that factory to be retooled to produce chemicals that would never occur otherwise -- and most of the proteins we depend upon are themselves manufactured. What this implies is that the unlikely complexity of living things does not occur by some unimaginable concurrence of pure chance events but as the result of a series of successes (surrounded by many, many failures), each building on the last.
If you can imagine a small manufacturing robot designed to build more like itself and to capable of forming coordinated robot "colonies" that together manufacture further robot "colonies" with chance variations, you will see the potential for increasing complexity. If you add to this the element of competition between robot colonies, and the survival of those with the most sophisticated survival mechanisms, then you have a fair analogy to the mechanism that drives increasing sophistication of the design of organisms from the relative simplicity of small organelles to the almost unmatched complexity of a lettuce, with humans and other apes perhaps falling somewhere between.
It is not possible, at present anyway, to look back at those early moments of the Earth's prehistory and to follow exactly which chemical paths led, through increasing sophistication; increasing competition; promiscuous mutation; and remorseless selection, to the first structure we would recognise as living. But it is possible to follow the nature of the mechanisms involved and to see that the chances of the occurrence of events such as we understand are not at all vanishingly small but increasingly likely once they have a foothold; and that the foothold may have taken, in the right atmosphere, just a week. That the exact mechanisms are not known and may never be known, and that the odds of creating a self-replicating molecule to begin with may not be exactly calculable are not the strengths of Darwinian theory; but neither are they its weaknesses, as the theory does not seek to explain or predict such matters but rather to explain and predict what occurs once we do have something we recognise as living.
In discussing odds and chances, what we have to recognise is that they are references to hypothetical alternative universes. If I say that the chance of your blind-drawing the black ball from a bag containing a black ball and a similar white ball is one in two, I mean much more than "I don't know which one you will draw"; what I mean is that in every second universe, you will draw the black one. This is a crucial concept to grasp in any discussion of probabilities.
With reference to the formation of eyes, of nucleotides, or even of proteins, a probability represents, of all alternative possible worlds, the fraction in which the event occurs in which we're interested. Probabilities are calculated with certain assumptions of randomness, though. If I calculate that in every second universe you will draw the black ball rather than the white one, I will be incorrect if it turns out that, in every universe, white balls lose their heat faster than black ones and for that reason contract further than black ones and become harder to grasp.
Similarly, in calculating that the probability is low that the mutation of a particular gene will result in front teeth that cut rather than grind, the apparently resultant unlikelihood that humans should develop incisors convenient for cutting food is illusory if it overlooks that, of the hundreds of alternative mutations affecting the shape of those teeth, only the mutation producing cutting teeth will allow its recipient to get twice as much nutrition from the available food.
What appears to be mere probability (and therefore unlikelihood), can, then, actually be more than likely, due to what are termed selective pressures.
This is analogous to the "probability" of building proteins and nucleotides. Yes, if it required random rearrangement of atoms in random soups, the probability would be low. But in fact it is possibly much more easily for proteins and more-complex molecules to form once there are certain precursors in place, and the probabilities turn increasingly in favour of one kind of complexity or another until certain steps become all but certainties. When we produce a new human being from a mere 46 chromosomes, we don't imagine it to be an unimaginably small chance that a complex human being, complete with thousands of proteins and even two completely formed eyes, should result. We understand that from the simple recipe instructions contained in the long recipes lining the strands of those 46 chromosomes, that complexity is built up, step by step.

As it is in an individual organism's development, so it is in evolution. The sophistication of the most complex molecules, organs, and organisms is hardly subject to the rules of chance, being for the most part under the control of, and an emergent property of, slightly less sophisticated molecules, themselves the result of slightly less sophisticated ones still: it is an emergent property, not visible in the simple rules of the game but nevertheless flowering from them. Accidents will of course happen. In such sophisticated factories as we are, they will happen a lot. It is estimated that 90% of all human embryos abort. Of those developmental accidents that are not fatal, some, the majority, are distinctly disadvantageous. Every so often, though, one must provide some advantage. In this way, those living in extremely cold climates tend to successfully reproduce offspring with short, thick limbs, and those living on lactose-containing milk tend to successfully reproduce offspring producing a lactose-digesting enzyme. The success and spread of each advantageous trait is not a chance event any more than is the abortion or failure to reproduce successfully of organisms with highly disadvantageous ones; it is in fact a highly probably emergent result of the mechanisms involved.
What do you think -- does it start to make sense when you realise that the construction of any complexity in an organism is the end result not of a chance event but of a process of many steps, each step not at all unlikely but merely one successful small mutation amongst many, most of which end up carried by few offspring and eventually lost altogether?
Cheers --
John
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"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."

— Plutarch