redstar2000

I think it rather unlikely on this board that anyone disputes the neo-Darwinian synthesis as the fundamental basis of evolutionary theory and of biology as a science.

What concerns me in this thread is what I have labelled the "neo-Darwinian metaphor"...the application of contemporary biological concepts and terminology to non-living organisms and even to social, political and economic problems.

Those with a modest acquaintance with the history of scientific metaphors will not be surprised by this. Newtonian physics, the early Darwinian hypothesis, and computer science have all gone through a "fashionable" phase...with, in my view, less than happy results.

I don't deny that the use of a "scientific metaphor" can sometimes shed light onto an altogether different field of study. What I question is the seemingly wide-spread notion that a metaphor from one science can be a "universal key" to understanding everything.

To be specific, the evidence supports "natural selection" with regard to living organisms...not universes, stars, ideas, consumer products, or social-political-economic systems. There may be some interesting parallels...and some extraordinarily misleading ones.

In particular, the use of biological metaphors should be approached with the greatest caution...recalling how Darwin's work was horribly perverted in the first five decades of the last century.

Surely we should have learned better, should we not?

Jesse

It isn't so much a "metaphor" as an attempt to apply the Darwinian mechanism to areas other than population genetics--the study of complex adaptive systems suggests that all of them work by a process of variation and reinforcement of successful variations. This is true of a wide variety of biological systems, from the immune system to anthills, and it's likely that a pseudo-darwinian process is responsible for the wiring of the brain (on this subject, see some of Gerald Edelman's books, like Neural Darwinism or A Universe of Consciousness). Some good introductory books on "complexity theory" and general models of complex adaptive systems:

Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Emergence by Steven Johnson
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger Lewin
Signs of Life by Richard Sole and Brian Goodwin (goes into a bit more details about the mathematics than the others I've mentioned)

Applying this stuff to social systems gets more speculative, but there is evidence that complexity theory can yield insights in this area. Check out a book like Linked: The New Science of Networks for some interesting new developments in the theory of self-organizing networks, which seem to apply equally well to gene networks in cells and to networks of social relationships or the growth of the internet. There is a fair amount of connection between the theory of networks and Darwinian theory, especially the idea of nodes having different fitness levels and competing for links, which ends up being an important part of the explanation for why all these networks share certain features, such as a power-law distribution of links per node (scale-free topology). Here are two reviews of the book which go into some more detail:

http://www.hp.com/execcomm/itjournal...rticle11a.html

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/linked.html

A few more links on the subject of self-organizing networks in general:

http://www.ukpoliticsmisc.org.uk/use...scale_free.htm

http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2001/0...cs_082201.html

http://www-sop.inria.fr/mistral/pers..._networks.html

http://complex.upc.es/~ricard/complexnets.html

MyKell

Well I thought that the study of complexity and self-organization research tries to undermine the power of Natural selection (the main tenet of neo-Darwinism) being the sole source of order in biology. In his recent book, Investigations, Stuart Kauffman tackles this problem by a quest for a fourth law of thermodynamics and devising oncepts like an "autonomous agent" and the "adjacent possible".
I do see self organization as being a source of order in biology different than natural selection, but I do not think it undermines its role. What do you think Jesse?

Now for the application of neo-Darwinism on other fields. Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, and Daniel Dennett apply it on social theory and cultural evolution by the use of memes.

redstar2000

Jesse, thanks for the links. I read the free ones carefully (a fitness characteristic that went unmentioned in the discussions of internet websites).

I suppose I'm treading on intellectually "thin ice"...perhaps I'll learn a few things even if the ice "breaks".

I agree that complexity theory is more than just a metaphor and the evidence clearly indicates its validity...in biology. (And, curiously, in physics...that was a surprise to me.)

I'm sceptical of its utility with regard to the internet. Is, for example, the Yahoo Chat Rooms site more "fit" than the Infidels Forum Discussion Board? What does "fit" really mean in that context?

I'm even more sceptical about its application to social phenomena like sexual contacts, ties between boards of directors of different companies, success or failure of consumer products, etc. It seems to me to be even harder to define "fitness" in a non-tautological way in these contexts.

I live on a street that has two nearby small restaurants; one is a small family-owned place, the other a chain burger-joint. Meals at the family restaurant cost roughly 25 to 50% more than the burger-chain place...but they consist of real food, of course, and not the "whatever" that the burger-chain features.

By complexity theory, the burger-chain is "more fit"...more profitable, has more customers, etc. Yet, the family-owned restuarant serves better food...which, one would assume, is the purpose of a restaurant in the first place.

My point is that human social interactions and human institutions are actually more complex than complexity theory allows for. It's not just a matter of numbers.

Jesse

redstar:
By complexity theory, the burger-chain is "more fit"...more profitable, has more customers, etc. Yet, the family-owned restuarant serves better food...which, one would assume, is the purpose of a restaurant in the first place.

Well, I'd say that "fit" is not meant to be a value judgement, in biology or when applied to things like webpages. It just stands for the inherent features of a thing that make it more likely to be successful, by whatever objective standard we are using to measure "success"--likelihood of surviving and reproducing for organisms, likelihood of a given webpage being linked to by someone who visits that page, etc.

The actual causal factors that make a particular organism more likely to survive in a particular environment are going to be incredibly complex, but "fitness" allows you to abstract that all away and just assume there is a characteristic probability for a particular organism. Similarly, the psychological factors involved in giving a webpage a higher probably of being linked to may be incredibly complex, but as long as we can assume there is some characteristic probability that an average visitor would choose to link to the page, then we can justify talking about the "fitness" of webpages too.

Asha'man

For a business, I would define fitness as serving the needs of investors. For a big chain, profit is probably the only need, more customers is just a way to obtain profit. For a family owned resturant, profit is only part of the need, other needs include providing employment for family members who are skilled at cooking, and perhaps the satisfaction of serving good food.

In either case, the resturant will be closed as soon as it is unable to meet the needs of the investors.

redstar2000

Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that what I am trying to convey is something of a "hunch"...that the further a paradigm in science is extended from its original source, the more it becomes "metaphor" and the less useful information it is capable of extracting.

However exciting complexity theory may be regarding biology, what useful information does it tell us about human social interactions and institutions?

For example, that the local outlet of a burger-chain is more profitable than the small family-owned restaurant that it competes with is something we already know...the "food" is dramatically cheaper than its competitor and many people simply can't afford the higher prices. We have no need of the concept of "fitness" to reveal this.

Or consider the "node" individual who serves as a member of the board of directors of 26 different companies.(!) That corporations make use of interlocking boards of directors has been known for quite a long time. That this particular individual "holds the current record" says very little. Is he a "hard-ass" that grills the CEO of each corporation with tough questions that cut through all the "biz gab"...or is he a real "cream-puff" that can always be counted on to back up the CEO no matter what? How do the corporations which have this guy on their boards actually perform in the marketplace? Is he a "fitness" factor or an "unfitness" factor? Complexity reveals his presence (so do the annual reports)...but not his function or utility.

And to return to the matter of the internet. As may be the case with many of you, there are a few sites that I spend a great deal of time at...others that I visit briefly to obtain some specific item of information and then move on. Day in and day out, the site I visit most often is dictionary.com--I hate misspellings in my posts. So that site is running up a lot of "hits" from me...but my real concentration is elsewhere.

The case of Google is especially interesting. I don't know what your experience has been with that site: in my case, I've either found immediately and quickly exactly what I was looking for...or been totally unable to find anything but scraps of trivia. It can be very frustrating; a more "fit" search engine would certainly attract my attention.

I can understand why it would be useful to "abstract out" the qualities of "fitness" in bio-chemical terms and look first for the numbers...the numbers are a guide to further useful research.

When applied to human affairs, it seems to me that complexity theory simply tells us what we already know...at best. But replacing "successful" with "fit" and unsuccessful with "unfit" both conveys an aura of inevitability that I don't think can be justified and suggests a path, not a good one, that we have traveled before.