Evolution and complexity

Maybe you missed the part where I pointed out that isn't true. The Earth's biomass continues to be primarily comprised of simple organisms. Sure, there is plenty of complex life, but complexity is still the exception rather than the rule among living things on Earth.

Lol, I think I beat you too it by 30 seconds Crash.

I don't know, doesn't matter. I'm not looking at different branches, but at ancestors. If I may give it a try, I would think the organism that endured more time on the planet, became more complex (that's the dino, isn't it?). But I don't understand the process behind. Sorry, you're right. It's not everything (although I'm thinking that even microbes are more complex now). It's about that percent or less.Can you explain me this exception of an exception of an exception?

Are you familiar with the term "normalized distribution" or perhaps "bell curve"?There's always outliers - extreme individuals, one out of a million average folks. And the number of individual organisms is orders of magnitude more than a million. I shudder to even contemplate the number.Complex life is a blip. Why does it need a particular explanation? There's certainly no trend towards complexity that I'm familiar with. Look at my first post in this thread, where I talk about it some more.

I don't think that is what the ToE would predict. It may or may not. I don't think it's true either. There are just exceptions here or there where a later organism is more complex than an earlier.I don't see any reason to expect a modern microbe to be more complex than an earlier one. At this point we would have to know what "complex" is.If you mean a larger genome then I'd have to see number on the range of bacterial an archean genome sizes and try to guess from that if there has been any overall increase. I think it would have to be a guess since we don't have genomes for actual ancient microbes.I also thought that bacteria were mostly pretty close to minimum genomes for what they do now but don't know much about it.

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What goes? The Nose Knows!

If it is a Bell-curve then it will be okay. But I don't think that that's a right representation. It looks for me as some steepy cliffs in the biological landscape.I understand your point like this: no matter how the evolution mechanisms function, even if it's generally destructive, there have to be some exceptions due to statistics.

Okay if ToE doesn't predict this, please give me the chance on a complexity-adding adaption. That has to be far less then the chance on a beneficial mutation by the way, (because you're all speaking about exceptions).

Sure. However you choose to define complexity I'm sure there are some mutation and/or other genome changes (I'm not sure adaptations is the right word here but it may not matter) that would be a complexity adder. OK, now what?

What is the chance that such a thing occurs? Almost zero?What is the complexity-adding mutation rate? Almost zero?What is the time organisms needed to reach known complexity-levels? Almost infinity? Is 65 millon year from the K-T event enough?

But you haven't defined complexity yet.We haven't agreed that complexity as gone up all that much.These questions don't make any sense until you define what you are talking about. Starting from the KT boundary; is an elephant more or less complex than a triceraptops? How would I tell? How much more or less complex?I gave you that some changes add something you call complexity. I didn't say that everything is more complex now than at some point in the past.Why do you think there has been some large change in some quantity you haven't yet defined? Even if there has been some significant change in overall complexity there are several billions of attempts a year to get that increase (make that trillions) as each living thing is a new chance to have a complexity increasing change.[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 02-06-2004][This message has been edited by NosyNed, 02-06-2004][This message has been edited by NosyNed, 02-07-2004]

I defined complexity in post 27. We haven't agreed about an increasing complexity level, no. Indeed, we didn't. Maybe everything is just devolving from a range of complex ancestors, sort of Noah's story with super-devolving species. I thought the layers were teaching us something different. I'm not comparing the triceraptops from before the KT boundary with current life!!! I only want to compare a mammal (palaeomastodon?) from before the KT event with the now existing elephant.Or do you all think that, if I'm coupling complexity with information, every creature on our planet nowaydays, is of the same complexity level? So: trillions = amount of individuals over whole earth in short period * amount of mutations. Yes, why not? But you did only use pro-numbers.pros:
amount of individuals per generation
amount of generations over time
amount of mutationscons:
amount of beneficial mutations (versus other mutations)
amount of complexity-adding mutations (versus beneficial mutations)
probability that nature selects sufficient for the mutation
probability no bad luck happens to the bearer
probability of inheritance (Mendel)

I'll get back in an hour or so. Just out of time right now. I'll edit into this.

So complexity is just information times a constant of some sort? But then a completely random series has maximum complexity by the information theory definition. I don't think that is a useful defintion. In fact, that is why there are attempts to define complexity in some rigorous way that also meets our intuitive understanding of it.For our purposes here you have not defined anything new. Increase or decrease or staying the same we can't tell if we can't quantify what we are talking about.I would suggest that a good guess is that from the KT boundary(at least) forward "complexity" has had about the same maximum. The overall biosphere "whatisit" has probably gone up if you start from right after the KT boundary ( I think a kazillion megatonne blast would simplify things a bit) but probably not changed a lot since a time just before the KT boundary.I'll offer reasons why I might guess this if you will define terms. Uh, there is a small matter of some 10's of Myrs between the KT boundary and paleomastodons. I would guess that any of the elephant relatives over the last handful of millions of years are genetically within a few percent of the same as modern elephants and closer than that in genetic "information content". You are doing more than coupling so far. A simple constant in the definition keeps complexity conceptually the same as information just in different units.If we use genetic information content as the measure then we know that not all creatures are the same. We have bacteria with 100's of base pairs in their genome's to creatures with billions.The rest of the post doesn't seem very relevant since any mutation that isn't bad enought to be selected out adds to the total information content of the population genome (and that is a large fraction if not the majority).(Note: in all the above I'm using numbers of base pairs as a quantifiable measure of something. I'm using the word information because I think it is at least intuitivly correct. I didn't follow the "information in DNA" well enough to know if it is technically correct. Until I get something else to quantify I guess that will have to do.
Note: If we are talking about increase,decrease then we are talking in quantitative terms so we needs some kind of measure.)

You're right! That's true. But if there is no way to decode it, and information of the higher level (type 3) doesn't exist, this complexity of type 2 will not lead to complexity of type 3 (see post 21/27 for the different types).What does the fossil record tell you?Does proportional mean linear? I didn't know. It can be quadratic and so on, but I clearly suggest a positive defined relation between information and complexity on the same level. Try a definition yourself. I started with Kolmogorov-Chaitin (post 23), and that was not good enough (post 26). Do you have something better?If I'm speaking about increase, decrease, then it's qualitative. Maybe sometimes in orders of magnitudes, but not quantitative. Until now I used reasoning, no numbers. That's a difference that's obvious for every person. What's the biological term for this difference????

I think that the bacterial genome is about 4.3 million base pairs and the human genome about 300 million, but don't quote me on that!!! The point is that even organisms as small and "simple" as bacteria have oodles of DNA. They maximise this by having no introns (non-coding regions) like eukaryotic cells have and also have a "dual coding system" whereby a gene read in one frame codes for one protein and read in a different frame, or read backwards, codes for another protein. In eukaryotes each gene is interspersed with introns and this information has to be spliced out before the final protein can be assembled. Additionally, each gene codes only for a single protein and can only be read in one frame - there is no equivalent of the "dual coding system". On the face of it, this makes the system used by bacteria seem much more complex and sophisticated than that used by what we consider to be more advanced organisms. Does this help?