Guided evolution (split from Evolution not limited to life on earth?)

[Luc Turpin]

17 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

An ant has evovled to prove intelligence doesn't matter... 😉

Appart from disagreeing with your statement, what does it contribute to the discussion?

I may not be smart enough to understand the point that you are making.

Who are we to say that ant life does not matter. If it is only by chance that we are here, then our lives also do not matter.

1 minute ago, Luc Turpin said:

Appart from disagreeing with your statement, what does it contribute to the discussion?

I may not be smart enough to understand the point that you are making.

Who are we to say that ant life does not matter. If it is only by chance that we are here, then our lives also do not matter.

Bringing intelligence into the mix at the very least gives us the opportunity to manipulate our environment for which no proof is needed if you look outside your window.

[dimreepr]

4 minutes ago, Luc Turpin said:

Appart from disagreeing with your statement, what does it contribute to the discussion?

I may not be smart enough to understand the point that you are making.

Who are we to say that ant life does not matter. If it is only by chance that we are here, then our lives also do not matter.

The Total Perspective Vortex will show you your value...

[iNow]

1 hour ago, Luc Turpin said:

Intelligence emerged from matter, and then evolved by increasing its domination over the environment. This is one way at least forintelligence to have evolved.

Perhaps you don’t realize it, but your argument is circular. You say intelligence is required for evolution and then also say that evolution created intelligence. They cannot both be true. You need to seriously rethink your position. 

[Luc Turpin]

5 minutes ago, iNow said:

Perhaps you don’t realize it, but your argument is circular. You say intelligence is required for evolution and then also say that evolution created intelligence. They cannot both be true. You need to seriously rethink your position. 

I did not say that evolution created intelligence, but intelligence emerged from the living and then became one of the driving forces in evolution.

am-i correct that this is not circular?

if so, I will have to think hard about it?

my starting premise is that intelligence is in all living things, so if it is then there would a definitive evolutionary advantage to use it in order to survive, therein the theory of guided intelligence

let me know if I am faulty here also.

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, Luc Turpin said:

Guided evolution does not need the environment to be intelligent, only organisms. But organisms do shape their environment, at least their immediate one (e.g. slime mould)

 

If intelligence is in all living things, then there is no non-intelligent species. There are less and more intelligent species.

If there were non-intelligent species, then only trial and error would be left to find food, but I am not sure that this would be a viable strategy in the long term.

I should have said that I do not know what the end-game is, not that I do not know if there is an end-game. You were correct in pointing out this contradiction. 

 

First paragraph - No need to artificially separate intelligence from other traits as long as we recognize that intelligence is playing a role in evolution. 

Second paragraph - As a minimum, the organism's choices allow him to either survice or die, which shapes how species evolve. 

Sure, but having a long neck also shapes how giraffes evolve. 
 

I do not see that intelligence is qualitatively different from having a long neck, as far as its effect on further evolution is concerned. 
 

The organism population does not choose its evolutionary path, even though the choices its members make may affect that path.

[swansont]

1 hour ago, Luc Turpin said:

You would be surprised by how intelligent cells can be and they have no brains. Just the cilia and its role of scrutinizing the outside (of cell) world is astonishing.

I can hear some of you laugh already, but you would also be surprised by the level of communication between plants.

I am aware that plants communicate. But to ascribe this to intelligence dilutes the concept to the point of being meaningless.

 

[dimreepr]

1 minute ago, Luc Turpin said:

my starting premise is that intelligence is in all living things, so if it is then there would a definitive evolutionary advantage to use it in order to survive, therein the theory of guided intelligence

Do you realise how much you would need to 'Torture' that premise!!!

[Phi for All]

2 minutes ago, Luc Turpin said:

my starting premise is that intelligence is in all living things, so if it is then there would a definitive evolutionary advantage to use it in order to survive, therein the theory of guided intelligence

What good is that definition of "intelligence"? It's in all living things? What about plants without brains? 

6 minutes ago, Luc Turpin said:

I did not say that evolution created intelligence, but intelligence emerged from the living and then became one of the driving forces in evolution.

Are you still saying that only intelligent species evolve?

[Luc Turpin]

   Will respond this afternoon or evening, thanks!

 

[CharonY]

3 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

You would be surprised by how intelligent cells can be and they have no brains. Just the cilia and its role of scrutinizing the outside (of cell) world is astonishing.

Your definition for intelligence seems to include simple biochemical processes, as such it does not seem to be a useful definition. I.e. you could as well use the term life or survival instead of intelligence. And none of those are directly linked to evolution. You could survival all you want, but if you do not procreate, it matters little for evolutionary purposes. The premise you seem to make is similarly broad. Everything contributing to survival is consider guidance. This is not only overly broad but also seems to suggest that there is a target that is being guided towards to, without specifying it.

Together, these definitions are immensely unhelpful to discuss evolution, as it mostly ignores the actual connection to evolution, focuses on individuals rather than populations and largely ignores environmental selective pressures as well as stochastic mechanisms of evolution in favour of sliding the term "guided" in.

5 hours ago, mar_mar said:

Homo sapiens, who has evolutionary changes in one's development.

Not sure what you mean, but I want to emphasize that evolution happens on the population level (i.e. the composition of the gene pool of a given population).

5 hours ago, mar_mar said:

What time?

Generations.

[iNow]

2 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

intelligence is in all living things

Too bad it's not in all submitted posts.

[studiot]

57 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Your definition for intelligence seems to include simple biochemical processes, as such it does not seem to be a useful definition. I.e. you could as well use the term life or survival instead of intelligence. And none of those are directly linked to evolution. You could survival all you want, but if you do not procreate, it matters little for evolutionary purposes. The premise you seem to make is similarly broad. Everything contributing to survival is consider guidance. This is not only overly broad but also seems to suggest that there is a target that is being guided towards to, without specifying it.

Together, these definitions are immensely unhelpful to discuss evolution, as it mostly ignores the actual connection to evolution, focuses on individuals rather than populations and largely ignores environmental selective pressures as well as stochastic mechanisms of evolution in favour of sliding the term "guided" in.

Not sure what you mean, but I want to emphasize that evolution happens on the population level (i.e. the composition of the gene pool of a given population).

Generations.

Hey folks it after christmas/newyear so I've gotta give this refreshing bit of 2024 sanity a thumbs up.  +1

[mar_mar]

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

Not sure what you mean, but I want to emphasize that evolution happens on the population level (i.e. the composition of the gene pool of a given population).

What evolutionary changes happened to humans since starting walking straight? Do humans still evolve? What is the evidence?

[Luc Turpin]

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

 

I do not see that intelligence is qualitatively different from having a long neck, as far as its effect on further evolution is concerned. 
 

The organism population does not choose its evolutionary path, even though the choices its members make may affect that path.

First line -Having a long neck is not as effective as what you do with the neck

Second line - The choices its members make do affect that path.

3 hours ago, swansont said:

I am aware that plants communicate. But to ascribe this to intelligence dilutes the concept to the point of being meaningless.

 

Plants and cells do much more than communicate.  Intelligence is defined for wild plants and its role in fitness identified. Intelligent behaviour exhibited by single cells and systems similarity between the interactome and connectome indicates neural systems are not necessary for intelligent capabilities. Plants sense and respond to many environmental signals that are assessed to competitively optimize acquisition of patchily distributed resources. Situations of choice engender motivational states in goal-directed plant behaviour; consequent intelligent decisions enable efficient gain of energy over expenditure. Comparison of swarm intelligence and plant behaviour indicates the origins of plant intelligence lie in complex communication and is exemplified by cambial control of branch function. Error correction in behaviours indicates both awareness and intention as does the ability to count to five. Volatile organic compounds are used as signals in numerous plant interactions. Being complex in composition and often species and individual specific, they may represent the plant language and account for self and alien recognition between individual plants. Game theory has been used to understand competitive and cooperative interactions between plants and microbes. Some unexpected cooperative behaviour between individuals and potential aliens has emerged. Behaviour profiting from experience, another simple definition of intelligence, requires both learning and memory and is indicated in the priming of herbivory, disease and abiotic stresses.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0098

 

3 hours ago, Phi for All said:

What good is that definition of "intelligence"? It's in all living things? What about plants without brains? 

Are you still saying that only intelligent species evolve?

You do not need a brain to be intelligent; cells are intelligent in their own manner; please have a look at "The Secret Language of Cells". Evidence based studies were used in preparation of this book.  I might be mistaken, but this looks a lot like intelligence to me.

I reiterate, I am not saying that only intelligent species evolve, I am saying the all living things are intelligent, even plants without brains. There are no living things without some form of intelligence, so all species evolve.

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

Your definition for intelligence seems to include simple biochemical processes, as such it does not seem to be a useful definition. I.e. you could as well use the term life or survival instead of intelligence. And none of those are directly linked to evolution. You could survival all you want, but if you do not procreate, it matters little for evolutionary purposes. The premise you seem to make is similarly broad. Everything contributing to survival is consider guidance. This is not only overly broad but also seems to suggest that there is a target that is being guided towards to, without specifying it.

Together, these definitions are immensely unhelpful to discuss evolution, as it mostly ignores the actual connection to evolution, focuses on individuals rather than populations and largely ignores environmental selective pressures as well as stochastic mechanisms of evolution in favour of sliding the term "guided" in.

 

Point well taken. I will take time to prepare a response with more pointed definition and see if it is more helpfull in discussing evolution.  As for "guided" evolution, I was definitly not the first to coin the term. I am starting from the point that all living things have some sort of intelligence, meaning that they are making choices based on information, which helps them survive and procreate and pass on their germ lines to the next generation. That is the kind of "guided" evolution that I am talking about. I am also saying that randomness has a lot to do with the matter of evolution.  Am-I wrong?

1 hour ago, iNow said:

Too bad it's not in all submitted posts.

I am trying to be as intelligent as I can be. We all have our limitations, but it is maybe the subject matter, not the messenger, that is at stake here.

Ludicrous is the idea or ludicrous is the person? or both? which makes communication more difficult.

[iNow]

24 minutes ago, mar_mar said:

Do humans still evolve? What is the evidence?

Tens of thousands of people die from flu and Covid before having offspring. 

Every year. 

[Phi for All]

2 minutes ago, Luc Turpin said:

You do not need a brain to be intelligent; cells are intelligent in their own manner;

You should use a different word for what cells are, otherwise you're saying cells and humans are both intelligent, and I can't think of a context where that's meaningful, and doesn't cloud the issue with having to explain exactly what you mean every time you make the claim. "In their own manner"? You can use that with everything, you know. "Pigs can fly, in their own manner." "Manhole covers are coins, in their own manner."

When we speak of intelligence in a normal scientific context, it does require a brain. When you're speaking about anything related to animal intelligence, plants aren't even considered. And when you're speaking of human intelligence evolved from a common ancestor with other primates, we often don't even consider insects. Intelligence may be a spectrum, but claiming individual cells are on the same spectrum with the higher level cognitive feats humans are capable of diminishes the concept.

21 minutes ago, Luc Turpin said:

please have a look at "The Secret Language of Cells". Evidence based studies were used in preparation of this book.  I might be mistaken, but this looks a lot like intelligence to me.

I looked at the reviews and didn't find the word "intelligent" at all. It seems to be drawing a parallel between chemical communication between cells and human communication between themselves. The cells "ask questions" and "receive answers" and "gather information", but that's just anthropomorphizing. Cells and their capabilities are astonishing, but individually there's NOTHING that suggests any popular definition of intelligence going on there. 

[swansont]

1 hour ago, Luc Turpin said:

Intelligence is defined for wild plants and its role in fitness identified. Intelligent behaviour exhibited by single cells and systems similarity between the interactome and connectome indicates neural systems are not necessary for intelligent capabilities. Plants sense and respond to many environmental signals that are assessed to competitively optimize acquisition of patchily distributed resources.

When you quote a source you should indicate what is quoted, so that it may be distinguished from your own words.

One article is not a consensus. Is there a mainstream definition of intelligence you can point to?

Plants don’t choose where to sprout; there is no optimization there. Reactions that all of a species of plant has is not intelligence - a plant doesn’t choose to face the sun, or open its petals when it rains. That’s hardwired behavior. There’s no choice, so there is no intelligence.

Your description suggests that simple stimulus-response is “intelligence.” As I said earlier, this dilutes the definition - you can have behavior of nonliving entities or chemical reactions that do some of these things.

[TheVat]

5 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

I did not say that evolution created intelligence, but intelligence emerged from the living and then became one of the driving forces in evolution.

I expect you're getting some pushback on that.  For one thing, intelligence is a vague blanket term for a vast array of cognitive skills.   For another, some species have evolved in ways driven by other forces than intelligence.  While a crow drops pebbles in a bottle to raise the water level so it can drink, a mesquite bush completely absent intelligence puts down a deeper taproot.  An ancient hominin species, H. Floresiensis, decreased its cephalization ratio on a group of islands where protein sources were scarce and a large brain couldn't be supported on the food supply - it's likely this decreased their intelligence and yet it was adaptive in that set of environmental stresses.   Sharks are dimwitted and yet have thrived for hundreds of millions of years with a minimal repertoire of instinctive behaviors and no sign of augmenting their cognition.

Humans happen to be a weak, clawless, and neotenic species that found the developing of atypical cognitive skills like complex language and toolmaking to be adaptive as it spread through a huge range of ecosystems and climates.  We, as a species, are outliers in regard to the adaptive uses of cognitive skills.  And a global catastrophe which greatly diminished our protein supply could send us back to being pinheads like H. Floresiensis, cheerful morons digging up tubers in a planetwide shift to insular dwarfism.

[CharonY]

2 hours ago, mar_mar said:

What evolutionary changes happened to humans since starting walking straight? Do humans still evolve? What is the evidence?

It is fairly simple actually. Having no evolution means that the gene pool does not change from generation to generation. This is a situation we call the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle

In order for that to happen it requires certain conditions to be satisfied, such as infinite population size, entirely random mating, no mutations etc.

These are obviously not true for human, or in fact almost all populations. In other words, evolution is the normal situation and having no evolution is in fact an extraordinary claim. How would you, for example ensure that the next generation has the same genetic composition as the previous? Simple answer is, you cannot. What you might be thinking about are likely large-scale changes in visually obvious traits, but that is not what happens in the short time humans have been around. Rather, the level of phenotypic change you should be thinking about are things like, the shift in lactose tolerance, pigmentation. A fun study found that shift in folks growing up in the UK were an allele associated with higher nicotine dependency was weeded out because folks died young (due to high smoking habits). In populations where smoking was rare and also in modern times (again, fewer smokers) these alleles are becoming more frequent again (as selective pressure have lessened).

In short both theoretical as well as empirical evidence clearly demonstrate ongoing evolution and one might need to revise ones preconception of what evolution is to fully realize that.

 

[swansont]

3 hours ago, mar_mar said:

What evolutionary changes happened to humans since starting walking straight? Do humans still evolve? What is the evidence?

If only one could use a search engine to find basic information like this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

(bipedal locomotion started perhaps 6-7 mya, so this is actually a pretty tame threshold. A lot of variation in humans has occurred since then. Homo sapiens emerged a few hundred thousand years back, so there’s been speciation since then)

[AIkonoklazt]

14 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

Guided evolution does not need the environment to be intelligent, only organisms. But organisms do shape their environment, at least their immediate one (e.g. slime mould)

The intelligence of an organism does not guide its evolution, since intelligence is an attribute of the organism and not an attribute of the environment that's "doing the selecting."

[mar_mar]

9 hours ago, CharonY said:

It is fairly simple actually. Having no evolution means that the gene pool does not change from generation to generation. This is a situation we call the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle

In order for that to happen it requires certain conditions to be satisfied, such as infinite population size, entirely random mating, no mutations etc.

These are obviously not true for human, or in fact almost all populations. In other words, evolution is the normal situation and having no evolution is in fact an extraordinary claim. How would you, for example ensure that the next generation has the same genetic composition as the previous? Simple answer is, you cannot. What you might be thinking about are likely large-scale changes in visually obvious traits, but that is not what happens in the short time humans have been around. Rather, the level of phenotypic change you should be thinking about are things like, the shift in lactose tolerance, pigmentation. A fun study found that shift in folks growing up in the UK were an allele associated with higher nicotine dependency was weeded out because folks died young (due to high smoking habits). In populations where smoking was rare and also in modern times (again, fewer smokers) these alleles are becoming more frequent again (as selective pressure have lessened).

In short both theoretical as well as empirical evidence clearly demonstrate ongoing evolution and one might need to revise ones preconception of what evolution is to fully realize that.

 

No, no,no, wait. What time have passed since the first homo sapiens started walking straight? I assume it's enough time for the next 'large-scale changes'? Since evolution is a continuous process.

At first it was a huge change - chimpanzee turned into a homo sapiens. (You like to say "common ancestor", but if we are true to ourselves, it's a chimpanzee.)What a great change in the genotype. And then these are "lactose tolerance, pigmentation." I think about evolution as of a development. So, turning (ok) the common ancestor into a human is a development or it's a change in the gene-pool? It seems that turning the common ancestor into a human being is a great deal event. In my opinion, this is occurrence of mind, and even more-awareness.

 I ask about evolutionary change, comparable to this event. Or, at least, its origins.

Edited January 3 by mar_mar

[iNow]

The bad faith persists. 

[mar_mar]

7 minutes ago, iNow said:

The bad faith persists. 

No.

Where?

I reformulate my question. How does the science consider the changes occurred to the common ancestor?

[Eise]

4 hours ago, mar_mar said:

At first it was a huge change - chimpanzee turned into a homo sapiens. (You like to say "common ancestor", but if we are true to ourselves, it's a chimpanzee.)

Strawman alert! If you are arguing against evolution, then argue against what evolution theory really says, not your uninformed interpretation of it.