Complex/quantitative traits on the other hand have been known for quite some time. I don’t think it’s anything new, but the landscape is becoming increasingly clear thanks to large scale GWAS and analyses from many groups including Pritchard’s.
That is a very profound observation. It suggests a way that one can distinguish between something that evolved vs something that was designed.
This notion should be supported by the fact that we don't mutate in completely random ways, and the fact that most mutations don't kill us.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by ‘evolution doesn’t abstract’? I did not totally understand what the example given had to do with abstraction
If the evolutionary pressures on E (or C individually) are greater than on A, C could evolve completely out from under A to the point where A is no longer functional or foldable. As such, evolution can't "rely" on abstractions like "protein C" because their "source code" can be changed nonlocally and their function is dependent on very local conditions like temperature, pH, and surrounding molecules. Abstracting away g(h(i(x))) as f(x) in Mathematica is pointless when your packet sniffer can arbitrarily change the meaning of "h(x)" to "nop".
I'm not a biologist or geneticists but from everything that I've read about cellular biology and genetics I get the strong feeling that there is a lot of encapsulation going on. Sure, it isn't 100% percent perfect but there is still encapsulation going on. Evolution would probably be way harder without it.
One hint is the human body, there are lots of encapsulations: eyes, heart, kidneys, digestive system, etc.
Evolution can repurpose an existing system for a completely different use with just some tweaking.
This is a bit off-topic but I think paleo-ontologists fall into a similar trap, at least based on popular writing about e.g. sharks. Claims that they haven't evolved in 100M years because they're the same shape as they used to be completely ignore all the other aspects of the shark that could change without affecting the overall shape.
Of course there's no little physical switch. This is a giant mass of molecules bouncing around. A fellow I know did some interesting work on replacing simple checkpoint models with entrained oscillators. But this makes the checkpoints look like an abstraction.
That's our view of it, though. It's not an abstraction. It's something that looks like one.
This is a physicalist line to take which implies that the universe is entirely material, and abstraction is just something human minds perceive.
This itself is a physical phenomenon :)
Multiple genetic materials operating on multiple levels...
Thanks for this. Came here to post a comment and saw this Very similar view, with a different term.
Another way to define this is:
1. The higher level object/thing has traits/properties that the parts do not have
2. Understanding each part does not necessarily = understanding these traits
3. The parts are interdependent
4. The traits/properties of the higher level is determined by the interaction of the parts
... which is the definition of a system.
Why not? Humans are products of evolution too, and they abstract.
I mean, what we consider conscious (e.g. human activity) and what we consider accidental (e.g. the result of evolutionary forces clashing) are not very well defined. Heck, we haven't even solved the determinism vs free will issue yet.
What does this mean? Are cells, for example, not abstractions?
In the same way the banana skin is a great packaging solution, but it wasn't created to serve as packaging for our consumption.
1. Genes are not loci. The "one gene = one protein" dogma of molecular biology (expanded: "one trait selectable in breeding experiments = one compact locus of the chromosome") was a priori wrong, but it's taken us decades to undo the damage. We were led astray because there are traits that do map to a single locus, or single mutations that were found to be able to control a trait, which is not the same thing as the trait.
2. Distributed representation. If I point to a sentence and ask "where is the sarcasm?" (assuming the sentence is sarcastic), there is no answer. It's certainly a trait of the sentence, just as, say, being red headed is a trait of the organism. But a linear model showing each word's contribution to sarcasm isn't helpful.
3. Perhaps a corollary of (2), humans have the concept of abstraction. There are many situations where you can get something like an abstraction from evolution. If a human engineered it, we'd call it a leaky abstraction, but please don't get caught up on that. Evolution doesn't abstract. But there are structures that emerge that can have similar properties, especially from repeated exaptation. Consider the MAP kinase pathways. Lots and lots of cell responses involve them, in all kinds of subtly different ways. We don't try to claim that a MAP kinase is the gene for anything in particular, any more than we would claim that the interrupt for triggering a system call on 32 bit Linux is the cause of certain behavior that a program is supposed to have in a particular domain.