Found during a Google search on "John Stewart evolution":

Metasystem Transitions in Biology
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MSTBIOL.html

I got Moravec's latest book, "Robot: Mere Machines to Transcendent Mind", out of the Library when I was there looking for Kauffman's "Investigations". Even if you're not interested in Robots you should read this book. The key is "... Transcedent Mind". Moravec does not think small. He is as interested in the Singularity as the next
Extropian, it is just that he thinks of everything in terms of robots.
But by chapter 6, "The Age of Mind" he starts with a subsection called "Robots' End" which begins like this:
    "Exes will put astronomically more thought into their actions than Earth's small-minded biological natives can muster. Yet, viewed from a distance, Ex expansion into the cosmos will be a vigorous physical affair, a wavefront that forges inanimate matter into machinery for further expansion. But it will leave a subtler world, with less action and even more thought, in its ever-growing wake."
Anyway, Moravec is one of those, along with Kurzweil, that belives that mind is more powerful than physics. If you haven't yet plowed all the way to the end of Kurzweil's precis[1], I recommend that you make the time. It is very heady stuff.

Ted

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

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Reviews of "The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to Order the Universe" (1988), "Are We Alone? Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life" (1995), and "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life" (1999) all by Paul Davies.

"The Cosmic Blueprint" is a good book describing the fascinating
subjects surrounding the origin of life and the universe that supports it. The book is a bit dated, published in 1988, but it has the
significant virtue of providing a very solid foundation. I've been reading books and articles for many years, and have a good grounding in physics, math, and the physical sciences. However, I can certainly imagine that others, with different backgrounds, would find some of these topics very hard to follow. Davies, provides a careful and thorough tutorial on the difficult subjects of chaos, complexity, self-organization, biogenesis, cosmology and consciousness.

Mostly, he is summarizing the work of others, but in a some cases his synthesis provides real insight. I really appreciated his demolition of the determinism that has pervaded science and the whole secular world since Newton. He had a great description of the two arrows of time. One is the familiar arrow of increasing entropy that derives from the dreary second law of thermodynamics. The also describes a second arrow of steadily increasing structure, organization and complexity. The optimistic arrow is "obvious" even though its cause remains unknown.
I missed seeing better coverage of Stuart Kauffman, my personal
favorite, and numerous ideas of newer authors, like Robert Wright, Lee Smolin and Susan Blackmore. However, if you've found other authors a little too breathless or confusing, Davies provides a solid and
enthusiastic description of this exciting field.


Next I read "The Fifth Miracle", anticipating a current version of the same general topics. This book was much more focused on biogenesis and related issues. As expected, Davies provided thorough coverage of this complex and controversial field. As I had hoped,, he provided the latest information on the thermophilic bacteria and the new light their existence sheds of the possible origin of Earthlife deep in the crust and below the sea bottom. This exciting discovery helps explain how life arose so soon after the end of the period of heavy bombardment that Earth endured until as recently as 3.8 billion years ago.

But, not satisfied with providing one answer to this mystery, he also suggested a second one. The likely exchange of material between the Earth and Mars, exemplified by the infamous ALH84001 meteorite, is not much in doubt. Davies explains how this transfer can happen without pulverizing or vaporizing the affected material. He then couples this idea with the theories of panspermia to point out that both Mars and Earth may have been surrounded by a tenuous biosphere that extended into space. These biospheres overlapped and, importantly, would have
provided newly evolved life a haven from planetary surface conditions made intolerable by early bombardments of massive planetesimals. I found it interesting that while he emphasized the amazing radiation resistance of some species of bacteria, pointed out how this lends support to the panspermia theory and described the biosphere's extension into space, he didn't actually say that the bacterial radiation hardness could have been *caused* by repeated episodes of living off-planet during numerous sterilizations of the early Earth's surface.

He ends the book with some interesting speculations on whether the universe has some built-in predilection for life. Of course, there is no real answer to this question yet, but Davies provides a service in suggesting and supporting the possibility. This hope provides an antidote to the depressing and prevalent perspectives of Monad,
Weinberg, Gould and others that there is no purpose or direction to the universe.


Lastly, I read Davies' middle book (actually he's written two dozen of them) on the question of extraterrestrials. He starts with a good history of thought on the subject, which goes back a surprisingly long way. Then he discusses the panspermia hypothesis and its implication for independent origin of life in the universe, the significance of a possible message from the stars, and the various aspects of the
anthropomorphic principle. Spliced in the middle is a chapter about the nature of consciousness.

I was disappointed that the prospect of a technological singularity didn't factor into Davies' analysis of Fermi's question. But overall, this brief book provides a good review of thinking on this intriguing subject.

Ted Anderson (10-June-2000)

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Feh. Warning wrt the online version of the SFI Bulletin: The SFI site uses CSS.

Maybe drift, maybe not: Catching up on some crushed-trees reading, I found that the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) has a three-year Packard grant (yes, those Packards) to study robustness. It will build on previous SFI work in, among other areas, emergence and evolutionary dynamics.

From the SFI Bulletin: ...[R]obustness may be key to survival. The recovery of ecosystems from natural disasters, the ability of cells to tolerate insult, the ability of a computer to compute reliably in the presence of noise or defective components, the viability of an economic organization -- in all these processes, it is robustness (rather than, say, optimization) that plays the central role. Yet researchers in the many disciplines for which robustness is a relevant concept are typically hard put to even define the term, much less to contemplate fundamental principles that might apply to general contexts. [The] SFI scientific initiative...will explore the origins, mechanisms, and implications of robustness in physical, computational, biological, and ecological systems.

The Bulletin story about the Packard program is very detailed. The same issue also carries articles on networks and entropy that I found equally fascinating. You can read it -- and other issues -- online (Vol. 15, No. 2). I recommend it.

Edited by author 06-08-2001 04:13 PM
From David Mankins on separate list:

_Microcosmos_, but Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. Short (but very unfair) summary: we're really not much more than walking colonies of cooperating bacteria.

A quick peek at Amazon shows that Margulis has a number of more recent books on the same theme, but _Microcosmos_ is the only one I've read.

(Margulis, incidentally, collaborated with James Lovelock on the original statement of the Gaia Hypothesis.)

Edited by author 06-08-2001 03:43 PM
I've since finished reading Nonzero, and the biological half (really closer to a quarter) of the book was just as interesting and in line with my thinking as the first half, though it didn't go into as much depth as the first half. One reason for this might be that it's a book for a popular audience, and writing about human history is maybe inherently more interesting than writing about biology.

The difference from my thinking and Wright's book is one of emphasis. I'd like to examine more the role of specialization. I'd like to examine the dynamic surrounding the impetus for an entity to specialize and how that specialization may be rewarded because it's valuable and heavily used by a society, in turn causing greater interdependence within the society (be it humans or cells). Wright discusses many ways that entities cooperate -- he doesn't focus particularly on specialization. In fact I think he uses the word very infrequently.

But that's almost hair splitting, and it's certainly not a criticism of Nonzero, which I'd highly recommend to anyone who's followed this thread.

I posted this to a private mailing list a couple of weeks ago:

I happened to pick up Robert Wright's book Nonzero (paperback published in January). Another happy shock -- it's almost exactly the book I had in mind, though in much greater historical depth (and of course better writing style) than I could ever have done -- see [1]. Even the book structure is uncanny -- my (unlikely) book was to have *alternating* chapters, jumping betwen the human perspective and the early cell-biological perspective. He
reviews human history in the first half, then biological history in the second (haven't gotten there yet).

It revolves around the idea of non-zero-sum game theory, though he doesn't delve deeply into game theory; he uses the phrase more as a bumper-sticker mnemonic. It's based quite squarely on the idea of a larger "organism" evolving from cooperation and specialization within a densely communicating large-scale group -- exactly what I'd been pondering. His historical perspective is vast and deft in illustrating his points. I'm looking forward to the biological half, which has a good review for accuracy and
counterpoint to "trendy" views that minimize the power of natural selection (Wright has been an ongoing jouster with Stephen Jay Gould).

I'm delighted that Mr. Wright has tackled the subject with his usual conversational, masterfully researched aplomb. Sometimes though the conversational aspect gets in the way for me -- I'm looking for a list of main points, because the points are (to me) world-view-forming.

Oh, BTW, Nonzero starts with a quote of Teilhard de Chardin!
[We'd been discussing Teilhard de Chardin on the list]

I guess the coincidence isn't so great if I reflect that I've read Wright's The Moral animal and a couple of his Slate columns (though an extrapolation is far from obvious), and go with what I said in my previous post:

> [BTW, for me this goes to show that as we become more connected,
> it's more and more likely (especially for lesser minds like mine)
> that any idea we have has already been thought of, often in the
> form of a fully fleshed-out theory. All the hints and background
> that lead to a new idea have also been available to thousands or
> millions of other people (but of course that's no new idea either).]

Indeed Wright says this on p. 191 of Nonzero (which I read last night):

 The vast, fast collaboration allowed by information technologies
 slowly turned the multinational technical community into an almost
 unified consciousness. Increasingly, good ideas were "in the air"
 across the industrialized world.

I like the idea of ideas being "in the air" -- in fact I've fancifully said that ideas aren't really "mine". They're in the "ideasphere" and happen to come to me based on my circumstance and interest.

Steve

Sounds good, Ted. Your comments might be helpful at Amazon too, where the only review there is pretty darn muddy.

I am presently reading a 1988 book by Paul Davies called "The Cosmic Blueprint"[1]. It seems to cover many of the topics of interest here. I'll followup with a mini-review when I get finished.

Ted

[1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671602330

> ...Santa Fe Institute, which
> draws scientists and other Deep Thinkers from all over the
> globe.

From what I've seen, it seems like I could gladly spend a next life there :-)

Thanks for your kind hospitality, Steve!

I wonder if Barabasi and Watts have communed together over their shared interest - perhaps even at the Santa Fe Institute, which draws scientists and other Deep Thinkers from all over the globe.

(BTW, did we all notice how I [smugly] pointed out Princeton's misspellation with my [sic]...and then gracefully went on to commit one of my own in my very next sentence, mentioning "evolotion"? Instant tit for tat, I guess - go ahead, universe, smack me around; I can take it. ;-)

Marcia, your post and all others are very welcome. That sounds like a fascinating must-read (for me) book, and it reminds me of m6 which refers to a NYT article about how the topology of networks is similar across many fields. I'm sure they're related, though the source there is Dr. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at Notre Dame.

Wow!

(Steve, since you posted this link in a note to the IRRlist, I'm considering myself "invited" - hope that's okay w/ you and others in this discussion.)

The IRRlist note I sent yesterday (clipped below) seems relevant to this discussion (and perhaps tangentially related to Dan Kalikow's public Web Epiphanies QT). My note was in part a response to Gary Stock's reading suggestion on the Teilhard de Chardin thread: "Wonderfully comprehensive (and worth reading every word): a correlation of progress, people, wildlife, and the web: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1132-2001May8.html ."

Of interest to Irregulars who followed that [Tielhard de Chardin] thread might be Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness, by Duncan J. Watts. The book is a general exploration that asks under what conditions a small world can arise in any kind of network.

From [the Princeton site]: "The networks of this story are everywhere: the brain is a network of neurons; organisations are people networks; the global economy is a network of national economies, which are networks of markets, which are in turn networks of interacting producers and consumers. Food webs, ecosystems, and the Internet can all be represented as networks, as can strategies for solving a problem, topics in a conversation, and even words in a language. Many of these networks, the author claims, will turn out to be small worlds."

For your further edification, here's another paragraph from the Princeton site:

"How do such networks matter? Simply put, local actions can have global consequences, and the relationship between local and global dynamics depends critically on the network's structure. Watts illustrates the subtleties of this relationship using a variety of models--the spread of infectious disease through a structured population; the evolution of cooperation in game theory; the computational capacity of cellular automata; and the sychronisation [sic] of coupled phase-oscillators."

(And which Irregular was it who recently did an amusing little family test on the theory of the evolotion of cooperation in gaming?)

Edited by author 05-19-2001 10:50 PM
And now it appears that Teilhard de Chardin (or successors such as John Stewart) long ago thought through much of this. Here's my IRR post for reference:

I'm late coming to this thread, and have even lost the first post and link.
But WOW, what a discovery for me. Thanks very much to whomever posted the
first message on Teilhard de Chardin.
I've mulled over this idea of cooperation and specialization happening at
greater scales on my sorta-blog[1], so I'm excited to find that much greater
minds have thought this through long ago.
This T. de C. page [2] mentions a publication called Evolution's Arrow
that's derived from Teilhard de Chardin. It's amazingly close to my thoughts
and of course much more comprehensive.
I haven't read the T. de C. materials in any depth. Do they talk about
specialization as well as cooperation?  I think that's important to the
evolution-as-aggregation process.
Here's the main part of my blog entry:
======
There's an evolutionary process that results in a new entity that's an
amalgamation of smaller-scale entities. On the grand scale, this formation
is much more significant than the adaptation of each individual entity
through natural selection. It's the appearance of a more complex, more
organized entity.
At some point, single-celled creatures "evolved into" higher forms of life
where each cell has a specialized function and coordinates closely with
other cells*. Does that same evolutionary process act on humans? As we
become more and more specialized in our work and more highly connected, are
we in fact forming larger-scale entities, or even a single global entity?
We can answer simply: yes, they're called societies and interest groups of
all scales. But I'd like to examine the process of social formation and
relate it to evolutionary processes. Evolutionary processes can be viewed as
the response of a reproducing organism to an environmental pressure that
causes its form to adapt, over generations, in order to survive (viewing it
as an intentional process from the organism's perspective).
What are the pressures on the "Humans On Earth" entity that demand greater
specialization and connectivity in order for it to survive?
======
Now here's the intro to Evolution's Arrow:
Stewart argues that evolution is directional and progressive, and that this
has major consequences for humanity. It argues that evolution moves in the
direction of producing cooperative organisations of greater scale and
evolvability - evolution has organised molecular processes into cells, cells
into organisms, and organisms into societies. The book founds this position
on a new theory of the evolution of cooperation. It shows how self-interest
at the level of genes and individuals does not stand in the way of the
movement of evolution toward increasing cooperation. Evolution progresses by
discovering ways to build cooperative organisations out of self-interested
individuals.
======
[1] http://www.quicktopic.com/blurcircle?SpecializationAndCooperation
[2] http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jhayesboh/teilhard.htm
I'd welcome further discussion on this at
http://www.quicktopic.com/5/H/RdGDfdQyR9Goukww4c5c
It's been going on awhile and meandered a bit, but please just pick up
whereever you like.
[BTW, for me this goes to show that as we become more connected, it's more
and more likely (especially for lesser minds like mine) that any idea we
have has already been thought of, often in the form of a fully fleshed-out
theory. All the hints and background that lead to a new idea have also been
available to thousands or millions of other people (but of course that's no
new idea either).]
Steve

Well, we may have to agree to disagree on the off-earth population question. Once you buy the "earth is the cradle of humanity" paradigm it is "obvious". Also, if you accept the "exponential rate of technological advancement" theory, you would expect many times more progress in the 21st century as in the 20th. So looking at the shuttle and the space station and saying "too resource intensive" may not be a good guide for what is reasonable in 2050 or 2075. By way of clarification, only a tiny fraction of the off-earth population would live on planets, most would be on satellites, asteriods, and, especially, artificial habitats.