George Williams: Complexity Theorist

No surprise. I can read a block of material, somewhat removed from Neodarwinian models, and then reread George Williams to find that he's already said it.

My most recent labor has been parsing Stu Kauffman, "At Home in the Universe." I sat in the mall yesterday with "Adaptation and Natural Selection" for a refresher on adaptations and potential flaws with psychological adaptations.

This paragraph leaped out. I had never noticed it before.

from "Adaptation and Natural Selection," Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 5.

" Evolutionary adaptation is a phenomenon of pervasive importance in biology. It's central position is emphasized in the current theory of the origin of life, which proposes that the chemical evolution of the hydrosphere produced at one stage an 'organic soup' of great chemical complexity, but lifeless in its earliest stages. Among the complexities was the the formation of molecules or molecular concentrations that were autocatalytic in some manner. This is a common chemical property. Even a water molecule can cataliyze its own synthesis. Only rarely would a molecule be formed that would produce chance variations among its 'offspring' and have such variations passed on to the next 'generation,' but once such a system arose, natural selection could operate, adaptations would appear, and the Earth would have a biota."

Copyright 1966, 1992 Princeton University Press

The following series will center on complexity theory as an essential framework for evolutionary theories. JB

Replies:

Abridged Repost: 13 Hours in Manhattan, 4 in Brooklyn , by James Brody (with comments from Howard Bloom), 4/2/00 Life at the Edge: Complicators and Simplifiers in Human Nature, by James Brody, 07/02/00 From Physics to Psychotherapy: Phase Transitions and Adaptations, Diagnosis and Treatment*, by James Brody, 10/18/00

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