Why do you persist in trying to add useless confusing language?
then we could simply move forward to discussing what decisions went into the creation of species that we see today.
Why not just discuss what mutations or genetic processes have gone into the creation of species we see today? Or what selective pressures have shaped the creation of species we see today? What advantage does adding a vague and numinous concept such as 'decisions' bring?
Wouldn't almost every single event which has ever occurred in the evolution of the many lineages of life we see today have had possible alternatives which will have been resolved by 'decisions'? What if the dinosaur killing meteorite had decide to miss the Earth? What if DNA had decided to prefer a levorotatory form?
The new science sounds pretty much useless. Can you give us an example of its actual experimental application? It sounds like another venue for postmodernist parvenus to babble endlessly about meaning. As far as I can see there isn't a shred of evidence for 'strong anticipation'. TAborsky says in her blog ...
this internal informatonal system, which I call Strong Anticipation, comes up with hypothetical solutions to environmental concerns. Hypothetical, not actual, so that there is no destabilization of the system. It comes up with a number of such hypotheses. Any one of them would function as a solution.
But, the system itself 'chooses' ONE solution. This can be a random choice but remember, any one of them would function, because the system has 'pre-approved' all of them as informationally relevant in this domain. This then emerges as the new property of the system, and becomes dominant in the real world.
As far as I can see this view is pretty well entirely divorced from the real world. We have real world concrete mechanisms for the production of non-hypothetical solutions, they are the mechanisms of mutation, and a system for making a non-random choice between them, natural selection. Have you never come across Occam's razor? What is Taborsky doing if not multiplying entities needlessly, even if they are hypothetical informational entities.
How exactly does one differentiate between the existence of non-chosen informationally relevant hypothetical solutions which a system 'comes up with' and those which are simply inherent possibilities due to the properties of the material composition of that system? Is there a difference? If not then what is the point of 'Strong Anticipation'? How does such a system explain deleterious mutations? As with the design hypothesis the explanation must encompass bad design/maladaptation since presumably the system has also come up with these hypothetical solutions.
The one thing this does remind me of is some pretty far out QM speculation I came across somewhere that DNA functions as a form of quantum computer where a sequence phase space is explored described by the possible evolution of the wavefunction for that DNA and that this wavefunction interacts with itself in such a way that a specific result is propagated backwards in time from the most advantageous outcome, or I guess one of a number of equally advantageous, outcomes to instantiate itself in reality. This of course sounds like pretty much complete nonsense, but it does seem to resemble the Strong anticipation hypothesis quite strongly. I'm not sure if this is where it came from originally but a very similar theory is that of Vasily V. Ogryzko.
Ogryzko writes:
The use of the quantum theory formalism in our approach is based on idea that the environment plays a similar role in many instances of biological adaptation, in particular, in the case of directed mutations. According to current understanding (Zurek, W.H. et al., 1993. Coherent states via decoherence. Phys. Rev. Lett. 70, pp. 1187-1190) the so called ”preferred basis' for the description of a macroscopic system consists of the states of the system which ”survive' the interaction with the environment, which is considered as constantly ”observing, measuring' the system. Upon the change in environment, the preferred basis can also change. In this case the states of the old preferred basis will have to be presented as linear combinations (superpositions) of the new basis. Then, the ”adaptation' of the system to the new environment will occur as a reduction of the old state vector to one of the new ones. In other words, the state vector reduction describes how a previously stable state of the system (corresponding to one of the preferred states), becomes unstable (or metastable) upon a change in the environment and has to be resolved to a new stable state.
How does this relate do you think?
TTFN,
WK
P.S. Sorry if this is a bit late in the discussion, I drafted this reply at work and when the network crashed I was unable to post it although I didn't lose the text at least.
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