ABSTRACT: Who are we to assume that all things continue as they were if left alone? Who made us the power brokers to assign 'continuity and constants' to nature, making them rulers of the universe? Obviously, things have not quite turned out that way. Change and progress are as much the rule in the real world as the exception, and this is especially true of organisms as they are studied in the field biology, medicine and anthropology.
We only need to look at the processes of growth and aging to see that organisms never really stay the same. Throughout the life cycle, organisms undergo a constant flow of cycles and patterned change. Some of it is progressive; most is cyclical. Many changes are facilitative, but others are debilitative, especially those in later life. A truly remarkable fact is that the same is true of nature in general. Even microorganisms mature, grow old, produce new life, and die. Every living creature does, even the thousands-of-years-old redwood trees in California. Progressively increased longevity has not been a general feature of evolution, though increased complexity and intelligence have been. Species develop and die off, too. Where did the life processions we know as maturing and aging come from if organisms are meant to continue the same as they were in the past? Obviously, things do not continue the same always, or else nature would have incorporated a different processual pattern into life.
There is a methodical, constant pressure for progress upward in complexity in the physical world. Individual life cycles ultimately digress and face an end, and not just in the biological world. Stars and planets do so, too. They form, they grow old, crumple and die. Why is this so? Could it be that they have a similar range of timed change, maturing and aging-essentially a life cycle, also? Either such is the case, or something similar is happening. The same could be happening with species, and this is the view that NID supports.
The causes of biological progression could be as simple as music tempting the ears, or beauty entering the mind's eye, creating a synergy in the physical world! The tapestry we call nature could actually be the result of a preoccupation of the real world with a plodding sort of progression, or innate efficiency, pattern elaboration, greater complexity, perfecting intelligence, or even perhaps varying aesthetics put in at the gate- that is, sensations and sensors evidently placed in it! For sure, that's a big if, but it is essentially what information moving around inside an organism would look like if sensory feedback and response are occurring.
It seems to me that this is all NID need show empirically in order to reach legitimacy as as a scientific explanation: It needs to demonstrate that sensing activity and information (stimulus/response) flow is occurring at the cellular or molecular level in organisms. Then cells and molecules will be shown to possess rudimentary intelligence! And this is not that hard a task, since 'mindless' plants have already been shown to possess a high degree of circumstance-adaptive capability. Naturalistic intelligent design does not require a brain. It simply needs to demonstrate a pattern of directed response, problem-solving ability in the physiology of organisms.
Even sexual and artificial selection may be using sensors and triggers! That is the first place to look for what I will call reactive selection here. Sexual and artificial selection (for eg., sexual dimorphism and domestication) show signs of being readily identifiable real world processes and effects. Their track records are more empirical than environmental effects have proven to be. They also entail clearly identifiable referents and antecedants functioning inside organisms. They are thus easier to identify and observe than environmental processes and effects.
Identifiable causes inherent to organisms that could lead to continual progress of upward biological complexity quite likely exist inside organisms. There are a great many interrelated functions; some of them should have synergic tendencies. That is, some of them should push out of their immediate surroundings or jump level, combining actions into consequences that exceed the sum of their individual contributions, and even lead to new and novel actions.
In the lifeless natural environment, synergy can not be seen acting at rudimentary levels. Ever since Charles Darwin provided his environmental mechanism for facilitating the advancement of species in The Origin of Species, natural selection has not amounted to a process showing physical causes. It has instead essentially remained an effect for measurement purposes, a natural consequence only, although it does also get used as the high level generic term for the whole process. I am saying that natural selection has only shown up as a dependent variable in the empirical studies, and not as a real world independent referent. Of course, I am assuming that there is a continuous observable process or repetitious natural cause (a pattern found common to most casual analogies) leading up to most physical results that can be identified through empirical research. Yet natural selection does not manifest an empirical parameter to identify. Even the concept of fitness is an abstract and highly subjective one.
All natural selection is helpful for is telling us that speciation occurs in the environment. It is no more developed a term and useful for identifying causes in the environment than it was one hundred years ago. That's why other scientific concepts are far more useful as selectors. The whole basis in use of natural selection is on identifying superior survival ability after the fact, after differential performance has been demonstrated. This alone shows natural selection is not predictive as a variable. Natural selection's derivative, fitness, is a situationally dependent concept. It is a relative term, useful for comparisons purposes only, and not very useful for actual measurements in species or organisms.
Conventional evolutionary wisdom acknowledges that the biological progress of species, including their moving up the evidentiary ladder of complexity and intelligence, could be rooted either in directed natural causes or in overall, advantageous accidental outcomes. If the latter proposition is the case, progress is an innumerable compounded series of undirected fortuitous accidents (a noncausal description common to chaos and random-number theory), making natural selection an ineffectual mechanism in terms of identifying direct causes (independent variables, for instance). It could be at the most a contributory influence in this role, theoretically speaking. (What is really needed is a more unifying influence; more about this feature of synergy later.) If the former proposition is the case, some form of natural guidance system becomes necessary for there to be any general theoretical understanding of it, and a dream team or design algorithm advancing the assembly line of regulatory genes up to higher levels of complexity becomes necessary, also. This is what intelligent design has proposed. But the latter proposal would require the identification of a nonenviromental stimulus-response mechanism or something like it that is capable of propelling biological structures upward in terms of their real world levels of complexity. And it would require improved empirical definitions of the terms complexity and intelligence, what NID proposes to do.
Is such a natural control device out of reach at present? No, it is not. The problem is that there are several potential causes that can be identified or theorized for tests at present. First, we must assume a one-way step ladder exists in terms of nature's pattern of progressive complexity. Natural selection essential theorizes something so broad as to not be differential in tests, assuming there were any. It also could just as well be seen in localized geographical terms as a multi-directional, cyclical chain of effect, but it gets applied regionally in unidirectional step-ladder mode for long-term explanations primarily. This is because it has been inappropriately applied to the task of explaining upward biological progression, I believe. Again, theoretically, natural selection can only explain the matters of climatological adaptations and terrain adjustment. Also, there just aren't that many variations on themes applicable to natural selection, i.e., distinctive types of environments, even if a species has a wide geographical range.
Have you heard of harmonies, resonances, echoes, reverberations, synergies, etc. appearing as repetitive complexities in nature? These are oft-times novel, sometimes surreal combinations found in the physical world. They endure as patterns that can be rated as either pleasing, progressive, complex, or methodical to the senses. One principle involved in their creation is that forces tend to repeat and reinforce each other when placed within a context of constraint, and this can produce a signusoidal pattern in them. Another principle involved is that mutually reinforcing functional relationships occur naturally. These tend to produce harmonies and synergies in nature.
Even natural selection cannot escape the need to provide explanations of coincidences beyond the theorized chance benefit of chaos. An effect-unifying feature of any benefit-based mechanism is needed for higher functional complexity to be reached. The simplest way would be to identify a sensory mechanism in the environment. Feedback would then need to be demonstrated. Currently, such features are only hypothesized about the environment on a purely theoretical basis. But that is the challenge natural selection must meet in order to be taken seriously as a reliable upward thrusting force of nature. With current definitions of natural selection, finding such features is unlikely, mainly since the environment as a concept exists only at a high level of abstraction and as an essentially theoretical construct. Natural selection proponents need to start demonstrating correlations between environmental features/forces and genomes, thereby demonstrating the context of unidirectional synergy, too, instead of simply assuming propitious cause in a nondescript environment.
Cause is usually not that hard to find in nature. Take the very common example of music. Music is often found to be the product of asserted variations on a theme or an enduring complex pattern of sound. Music exhibits harmonies and synergy. It is sound bouncing around in a variety of directions within measured constraints. There are repeating sounds and variations on themes. Usually, music flows to a climax, whereupon a new cycle begins.
Now why can't biological progression be strongly effected by such harmonies, recombinations and synergy? Of course, there is always a chance to make counter arguments or the polar-extreme argument. In this case it might be that music is the mere interpolation of noisy coincidences as interpolated by a mind. Of course, the human mind can often form some pattern out of continuous random noise if it seeks direction and listens long enough to it. Expectations may even modulate it. In fact, this process is built into the human mind's perceptual tasks, especially the processes of sound and sight filtering. Natural selection appears to assume and utilize such a viewpoint, i.e., a nonrandom selection, asensory point of view. It attributes the complex, genome uplifting consequences of what I will call noise here (mutation and genetic recombinations) to a consistent environment- but who is to say the environment isn't much more chaotic than the gene and chromosome replication process itself? Furthermore, climate is by definition cyclical, not linear, and evolution is linear!
Fortuitous circumstance must be demonstrated in science, not simply assumed. Then our certitude can stand on data, not assumptions and value judgments. Research should both build and test theory, not be shaped and congealed into cases that appear to confirm it. Identifying cases in the real world as instances confirming certain propositions and then explaining the data presented by such cases as illustrative of those same propositions is illegitimate. It is research that is biased backwards. Yet case studies, and natural selection studies in particular, employ this logic frequency in research designs.
This is a point rarely addressed in evolutionary study and research: genetic 'noise' is merely imagined to be something less than data containing meaning. Chaotic effects get added up into benefitial patterns, getting turned into causes as a result, only because of the presumption of unidentified fortitous environmental forces, and the need of a mind to understand propitious circumstance. The problem with natural selection is that the environment isn't the likeliest force driving selection! Mechanisms internal to organisms such as control genes and physiological regulatory functions are more likely to be the cause! They certainly are more observable and measurable.
I once worked as a electronics technician in a college biology lab. Circulatory research was being conducted on rabbits by veterinarians at that site. They discovered that blood vessels automatically reroute themselves around blockages if given the time and opportunity, i.e., they create a spray of newly formed blood vessels jumping/shunting around any blockage of a blood vessel that has been temporary and repeatedly shut off. This assumed that such blockages were not so serious or comprehensive as to actually kill the organism. They surgically implanted a valve in a major blood vessel and shut it on and off with a timer while measuring the blood flow using ultrasonic blood flow meters. Later, they anesthesized the animal, and cut it open. They typically found a spray of by-passes created automatically around the valve by the circulatory system itself that would counter the effects of the incidental obstructions. The blood flow records charted the pattern of the ad hoc vessels' growth and development.
This is what I mean by physiologically regulated functions. Bodies have sensory and cure-making mechanisms for all sorts of continguency (read here 'adaptational') purposes. And they comprise remarkably intelligent adaptational mechanisms inside the organism, not outside in the environment!
Physiologically speaking, the rabbit circulatory system may be a smarter surgeon than the best human mind, smallest hand, and keenest eye! We are talking about an intelligence exceeding human intelligence demonstrated here in the physiological response of an organism!
Coarse external impetus views of biological progression such as natural selection wall us in. They turn on meaning of life and even turn the purpose of an organism's survival into a vacuous mirage, a mental construct- instead of a real world parameter to measure and refine! They also assign stand-alone real world causes an awkward, sideline role in the process. Wouldn't boxed-in harmonies, synergies, and resonances be better candidates as causes of directed, progressive biological change than incremental environmental contraindications at work!
What is behind the presence of nonrandom patterns and complex systems in nature? They are sometimes more complicated than the ability of any human mind to fathom them- far more than short-lived storms. This is just one incredible feature of nature. It is not an easy thing to explain. Nor is it an easy thing to explain away by a simple application of a mathematically descriptive or summative point of view. Physical world analogies and science teach us that highly improbable events are most likely caused by something physical, not supernatural or immaterial! A pattern merely appearing due to some highly unlikely, compounded chain of random, basic events is a description, not a cause (unless the whole universe has higher constructs and functions that in themselves possess empty meaning). Of course, one can interpret any pattern either of these two ways (and perhaps others). It's just that science's goal is to make sense of patterns, not relegate evidence to the stall that provides no explanation but a statistic trace of it. Understanding and explaining cause in the real world is an essential purpose of science. When its goals are sidestepped in academia, the action is regretful. Biological progress is much more than a rationalization about obscure, subtle features of the environment leaving behind a connected series of propitious, accidental effects that have been retained due to their projected real world, differential benefits to a species' survival potential.
Whatever the particular features of fitness are in particular organisms, their definitions are typically performed in a case-sensitive, subjective manner. The conceptual equivalent of backwards (after research) definition is used in identication of natural selection cases. However, any reframing of definitions after cases of fitness have been identified would invalidate the use of them as data points or cases because it creates adjusted data in the favored direction of the researcher's expectations. Particular case studies cannot not be used both for illustration purposes and for data purposes at the same time. Invalid data can too easily be generated in this process, and smudged data is the result. The core problem here is that insights gained from the identification of cases of natural selection are not seen as crucial opportunities for the scientific testing of any alternative hypotheses, or even for testing of the null hypothesis. They are merely seen as proof of concept examples. Research goes no deeper than that, because concept definitions are not being kept separate from data points. Research validation does not proceed past the point of proof of concept. As a result, the natural selection case-study research typically remains at the armchair speculative level, being performed ex post facto, after the discovery of any relevant empirical facts are discovered. And conceptualization to demonstrate fitness appears to be generated on a purely ad hoc basis.
Sexual selection and artificial selection easily show signs of having antecedants and referents, being clearly caused in the natural environment, but natural selection apparently rarely if ever leaves the same mark on its actions. Natural selection and fitness are results, not causes. Nature reflects cause and effect, and science developed in response to curiousity and need to understand the connection between real world cause and effect, not just to admire its effects.
So what is the cause of natural selection? As a mechanism and process, it has escaped close scrutiny. As a cause, however, it cannot escape it.
Cyclical repetition and intricate pattern are nearly as pervasive in our universe as continuity is. They are the basis of sexual selection, not natural selection. In addition, repetition and pattern are the staples of science, and not merely features of nature. They should not be taken lightly or treated with disdain and handled superficiality. Worse yet would be to totally ignore them due to the drone of a single, low-level pattern in the background of nature, statistical accretion. Natural selection may be evolution's abacus- a flat stone crowning the capital of its main column, but it is only the beads-on-wires counting frame of genetics. The column-carry 'keep' function of the mathematical abacus (not the architectural abacus above) can only be performed in a systems model based on sensory input/output using at least a well-timed, triggered mechanical response, or at most, a keen, attentive mind with good hand-eye coordination. That is, progressive complexity needs not only selection and retention mechanisms, but a unification as well. None of these have shown up empirically in the environment except as effects. Accidental coincidence of recurring, combinatory, interfunctional effects with sensory feedback is absurd as a causal explanation in any single organism as well as any one universe. We are not taking about storms or chemistry sets here, but living, thriving organisms.
The selective process of natural selection is, mathematically speaking an explanation of all biological features including the elegant, informed, and intricate which is based primarily on a reductionist explanation. It is much like a number incrementing machine or abacus accumulating profit. I happen to think that a slide rule or calculator would be a better analogy for symbolizing biological progress, not chemical, but the application of natural selection to such problems turns highly simplistic at times. An abacus is highly routine in its operation- just like the fuction of addition. An abascus is a hardwired adding device and natural selection gets explained in purely additive terms quite often. It is a synopsis of billions of particular otherwise inexplicable world events; that's why I call natural selection a mere add-and-carry machine. It is applying the principle of incrementing the mean to the problem of explaining the biological progression of forms and functions. But it says absolutely nothing about why we consistently obtain outrageously tasty fruits and profit from the tree of life!
Still, natural selection is one application of the brilliant principle of parsimony to naturalism! This can be satisfying indeed, even to the point of experiencing an epiphany, but is the catharsis enough? Is coming to a personal conviction a sufficient basis scientifically speaking? If so, science could be running the risk of turning nature into mere cyclical noise and destroying the progressing patterns that comprise the mosaic of its beauty and rhythm, and further empirical understanding. A more detailed view of biological progress is needed, not more rationalizations of the processual description type from a mere rubric such as natural selection. Now which is really behind nature's progression upward in the professional's view? Which is the real process at work? Is it synergic selection for improved complexity, rhythm and dance, or an environmental tax amounting to a purposeless, passive farce?
I still have quite a distance to go to fully explicate this line of inquiry. Sorry that I couldn't accomplish more in this considerable amount of space. I will endeavor to further elaborate the main points of this discussion in future blog entries. All I have attempted to do here is provide an introduction to the basic needs and issues involved. Why do so? It is one of the fundamental topics that concern naturalistic intelligent design (NID), and one that this blog is written for: to introduce naturalistic I.D. to the scientific community in a preliminary way.
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