I'm a biologist. I think evolution theory is only half right. What do you think of my Theory of Everything?

Great Debates
1

No, I’m not a creationist, and neither are you, I know.

But I do think that “survival of the fittest” and sexual selection only play a part in how life exists. How anything exists, really. I propose the same mechanism also should be applied in physics, social science. And nowhere is it more clear, as a vignette, then in the science of why and which memes are shareable, go viral.

What I want to do in this thread, if you lovely people will lend me your eyes/minds, is to bounce an idea off off you. I hope someone will be able to tell me this is an established idea. And point me to the group of people working on it. So I can stop thinking about it, because I think it is an idea worth spreading and I’m doing a poor job and would like to leave it to the professionals.

Okay, so what is this idea?

  1. Classic evolution theory, with survival of the fittest, and sexual selection, is only part of a larger truth.

  2. Things don’t live, or exist because they “work” or “work better, or best”. The unsolved question always was: “work” to do what? In biology, that was defined as: produce offspring with the same genes who are more likely to produce offspring. I would like to broaden this into: things exist because they can repeat themselves. More specifically, things exist because they can repeat themselves at an expanding rate. Things exist if they go viral.

  3. Things exist never on themselves, not in time, not in space. And the problem where to separate a thing from the next thing, has ever been only a problem of the limits of the observer. Which, for the sake of this discussion, is a human observer.

  4. Human observers distort reality in predictable ways. Knowing about those ways, and compensating for them, can yield us a better understanding, usage and prediction of all phenomena.

Like all theories, this one can be tested and falsified, in principle. But limitations of social science makes this harder then it could be. For example, if experimental set-ups are designed to isolate factors, when in reality all factors work in tandem, that yields us a very fragmented idea of cause and effect.
And like all theories, this one has an immense practical use. Lots of the advice stemming from it is familiar from Eastern religions. An example: the War on Drugs.
Humans are wired and trained to think in us and them, in problems and solutions. If you are Nixon, and want to define a certain amount of human misery as stemming from drugs ( and not from, say poverty), and you see multiple political advantages in doing so, you might start a War on Drugs. And if that doesn’t work, the human/institutional thing to do for the next decades is to try harder. When in fact a muddy pool is cleared better by leaving it alone then by stirring. Only recently have we ( and the World Health Organization) realized that this “solution”, the War on Drugs, is actually a big part of the problem. It fueled the problem. A muddy pool is cleared better by leaving it alone then by stirring it. And that the War on Drugs was a solution to the political problem of staying in power, rallying tribal loyalty, and smugly blaming victims and opponents. For that, it worked very well. But to lessen the problem of drug addiction, a solution more akin to Taoism Taoism - Wikipedia makes more sense. That would be to work with humans foibles, not against them. So, sensibly legalizing drugs and limiting excesses.

This theory also postulates that solutions often come from developments unrelated to the problem.
And it also postulates that anything desirable, first and foremost, needs to find a system in which it can go viral. Idealistic ideas first go viral in people who profit psychologically or socially from posing with new ideas. For the idea to go viral in other groups of people, it needs to have tribal, emotional, financial or other advantages.

So…does anyone get what I’m trying to say?
Please, try not to say “Duh” to everything familiar to you and “Probably nonsense” to everything unfamiliar. Not the elements are new, but, for me at least, the way in which I connect them. If you have thought something similar, I’d love to hear about it.

2

One testable hypothesis of this theory, is that ongoing social problems are usually fueled by misguided attempts to solve them; and those attempts keep at it because they serve other purposes.

An example on a macro level is the War on Drugs. If you are Nixon, and want to define a certain amount of human misery as stemming from drugs ( and not from, say poverty), and you see multiple political advantages in doing so, you might start a War on Drugs. And if that doesn’t work, the human/institutional thing to do for the next decades is to try harder. When in fact a muddy pool is cleared better by leaving it alone then by stirring. Only recently have we ( and the World Health Organization) realized that this “solution”, the War on Drugs, is actually a big part of the problem. It fueled the problem. A muddy pool is cleared better by leaving it alone then by stirring it. And that the War on Drugs was a solution to the political problem of staying in power, rallying tribal loyalty, and smugly blaming victims and opponents. For that, it worked very well. But to lessen the problem of drug addiction, a solution more akin to Taoism Taoism - Wikipedia makes more sense. That would be to work with humans foibles, not against them. So, sensibly legalizing drugs and limiting excesses.

An example on a individual level, is individual drug addiction. A large part of addiction, as I see it, is the shame and self-doubt resulting from ineffective attempts to stop using. And this is fueled by the belief that someday, if you try hard enough, the addict will stoip because of willpower. I suspect a large reason AA works, is because they stop this flow of misguided energy by saying, in their first principle: | “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.” Admitting powerlessness over alcohol is the foundation of your recovery. If you still believe that you have some sort of control over your drinking, you will drink again".
So, that is another systemic ( is that the word I’m looking for?) way of looking at addiction: that not only personality, circumstances and drug properties play a role, but the addiction grows because of attempts to stop it. Energy has to come from somewhere or, at the Newtonian level, movement stops. If your problem persists, the energy for persisting may come from the energy you expend in stopping the wheel… Which amounts to giving the wheel an extra push on the opposite side and thinking that amounts to a braking action.

3

You lost me when there was a jump from biology to sociology.

Also, at the very beginning of your post, is the classic confusion of Darwin’s theory of evolution with evolution itself. Evolution is a fact, as for how it happened it has several theories and explanations being used and considered.

But even there, I see a misunderstanding of what survival of the fittest is.

The phrase “survival of the fittest“, which was coined not by Darwin but by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, is widely misunderstood.

For starters, there is a lot more to evolution by natural selection than just the survival of the fittest. There must also be a population of replicating entities and variations between them that affect fitness – variation that must be heritable. By itself, survival of the fittest is a dead end. Business people are especially guilty of confusing survival of the fittest with evolution.

What’s more, although the phrase conjures up an image of a violent struggle for survival, in reality the word “fittest” seldom means the strongest or the most aggressive. On the contrary, it can mean anything from the best camouflaged or the most fecund to the cleverest or the most cooperative. Forget Rambo, think Einstein or Gandhi.

What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy.

4

I think you need to define your understanding of “exist”.

To me, once something exists, then it does exist, and will always have existed. If it fails to go viral, then it may stop advancing, but it won’t cease to exist.

I suspect that what you mean is that things survive if they go viral, and they won’t survive if they fail to go viral. But that seems to be a tautology, unless you can show how “go viral” is different from “survive into the future.”

5

So in other words, you propose replacing the theory of evolution with… the theory of evolution. No, seriously, that’s what it is.

6

Evolution is survival of the best adapted.

Your post observes that human sociology may be maladapted. That doesn’t test the theory of evolution. It may test our ability to survive as a species.

7

The very word for something that went viral as a “meme” in the original sense comes from treating mental ideas in the same way as biological genes.

8

I think the object of life, simply put, is to live. Life does that by adapting to its environment and successfully reproducing. If its environment changes and it cannot adapt, it dies out, which is why (it is postulated) over 95% of all life that has ever existed on this planet has become extinct. Intelligent life is more complicated because the brain seeks a higher purpose. It wants to learn, master, and control its environment, and it seeks immortality because it knows its life is going to end before it happens.

9

I’ve read through the o.p. half a dozen times now and I still cannot parse out a hypothesis that can be “tested and falsified, in principle,” in no small part because the o.p. goes from evolutionary biology to existential philosophizing to the “social science” of political agendas without any logical or causal linkages. Rather than write a long dissertation on the general misunderstanding of Darwin’s theory of natural selection (“survival of the fittest” was a term coined by the then-influential but largely dismissed Herbert Spencer as a way of justifying the socioeconomic philosophy that would come to be known as "Social Darwinism, and only later used by Darwin himself in the much narrower context of competitive fitness in local domains) I’ll note that the statement of the o.p. that “things exist because they can repeat themselves” is exactly in line with Darwin’s writing in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life and the later The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex that fitness is defined in terms of being fundamentally able to access resources and reproduce more prolifically than competing species.

No one educated in evolutionary biology has ever argued that evolution produces a globally optimized solution because the copious counterexamples would immediately contradict such a claim; evolutionary success is assessed in terms of reproductive fitness, and this includes extensions of natural selection, e.g. the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, theories of an ‘extended phenotype’ in systems biology, and endosymbiotic theory, even as the proponents of such theories argue amongst themselves which factors are dominant in evolutionary adaptations. That individuals or species “exist never on themselves, not in time, not in space,” is a key concept in modern systems biology where it is understood that any organism or species has evolved in the context of its particular biome and environmental influences which are also in a dynamic state of change and modification.

From a standpoint of biological science, I think what you are attempting to express is essentially holistic systems biology, which has often not been well taught in the typical undergraduate degree program largely because it is such an expansive topic that it is difficult to cover it in any rigorous way, and has only become a fruitful area of research in the last few decades. The more philisophical part of your thesis–that human observers distort their observations due to perception–is a wide-ranging topic in the philosophy of observational science and experiment design, a sort of neurosociological counterpart to the “measurment problem” in quantum mechanics.

Here you are on firm ground in terms of misunderstanding the purpose of the “War On Drugs”, which was never about ending human misery or reducing drug use, and has never been assessed on those merits. The purpose of comprehensive federal drug prohibition was explicitly about targeting a particular segment of the population and criminalizing their behavior (real and purported) to justify sweeping violations of civil liberties, justify expanded enforcement and surveillance, silence criticism, and ultimately disenfranchise political opposition. Contrary to the notion that the War On Drugs was a failure, it has been a stunning success for those championing it, leading to broad public support for things that American citizens would and should normally oppose including the warrantless seizure of property, increased stratification along socioeconomic class and racial lines, justification for hundreds of billions of dollars of military and law enforcement expenditures, and rationale for the unilateral invasion of foreign nations harboring ‘drug kingpins’, even when said kingpins were formerly on the payroll of American intelligence agencies. Prior to the War on Terrorism, it was the main justification for the creation of unprecedented domestic surveillance capabilities.

Drug abuse and addiction is, of course, a real problem with no easily applied solutions, but the fact that we put so few resources into treating addiction and abatement of the fundamental problems that result in addition, and so much into prosecuting the “War on Drugs” and incarcerating those accused for decades gives lie to the notion that anyone responsible actually cares about ending human misery or reducing drug use. The War On Drugs has been a rousing success at conditioning the America public to accept massive violations of civil liberties even even though it has been an utter failure at the ostensible purpose of eliminating drugs just as the War On Terror has been a tremendous success in justifying military adventurism worldwide even though it has utterly failed to eliminate terrorism and has produced more violence, unrest, and insecurity than prior to 2001.

Stranger

10

I’m not sure I’m following your OP (in fact I am sure I’m not following your OP), but what you are proposing sounds a bit like cultural evolution theory.

If your main point that ideas, cultures, movements and policies persist not because they are the “best” ones but because they are the ones that are most capable of perpetuating themselves, I think that would be hard to argue against.

Certainly actually working to achieve its goal generally provides an selection advantage to a policy, similar to the way that good hunting skills is an selection advantage to a predator but it isn’t the only force in play.

As Keeve pointed out saying that those things that are best suited to continue to exist most likely to continue to exist will continue to exist it is a bit of a tautology, but then again so is evolution. I tend to view the theory of evolution more as mathematics than biology, with biological evolution just being a specific applied case.

11

Quite true. But it’s important to point out that “perpetuability” often has little to do with efficacy or any sort of objective value.

12

The actions of individuals aren’t part of any modern theory of evolution itself. Individuals can fail or succeed without affecting the species. What matters is whether a reproductive sufficiency of individuals can thrive in their evolutionary niche.

Humans absolutely fit that description: they dominate every evolutionary niche they touch. There’s been, in fact, a heated debate over whether humans have taken themselves out of the normal process of natural selection because they can survive anywhere without regard to availability of food and resources. (On the species level, of course, not as individuals.) Whether that continues to be true cannot be certain, but if humanity succumbs to global warming catastrophes only the few survivors will get to claim evolution was involved.

13

This is one of the major theses in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene which proposes that life is defined by replicating patterns. As we call these ‘genes’ in biology, Dawkins proposed the the informational equivalent might be called a ‘meme’. He didn’t go so far as to say memes are alive anymore than genes are alive, but that they may be the building-blocks of something else we might call life.

What I believe you are getting at here, intentionally or unintentionally, is that complex systems do not lend themselves to a direct determination of cause and effect. (see the Cynefin framework for greater elaboration on this framing of “complexity”. Thus, it is not possible a priori to know what action causes a certain outcome. We can only develop strategies incrementally via the probe-sense-respond cycle (as opposed to an analyze, plan, act cycle), and the strategy we end up with may be very different from what we thought was necessary.

We can consider this model as the way that all networks evolve, whether they are biological life, or logistics networks, or memes in an informational network. Biological life is only special because it arose without humans influencing it. The imperative to choose comes not from a human, but from the environment constantly pressuring the organism to adapt or die. The diversity of choice comes not from sensing and analysis but mutation and recombination in genes.

So, in short, I think you’ve independently drawn a conclusion that many people have, that human social behavior changes much in the same way that life evolves, and because these are both complex systems, it’s not possible to intervene in such systems with a predetermined strategy to get a predetermined outcome. We just nudge, sense, nurture to keep the thing going in a good direction (or at least a non-fatal direction).

14

To the extent that this is testable, I’d say that it is false. Even the war on drugs is a bad example, as, say, opium use was a problem in many countries where it was legal, or indeed look at prescription opiates now.
I’m not saying the war on drugs was a good strategy, far from it. But it’s rather more complex than saying that was the cause.

This is a common thing for people to say, but even this is a subjective value judgement, not intrinsically part of the science.
For example, one could say that the purpose of life is to go extinct. Most have achieved this purpose, but there remains a tiny minority that have terrible traits like running from predators and enjoying sex that means they linger on.
That wouldn’t be a popular way of framing things but it’s equally consistent.

15

I’m really not sure what OPs thesis is and I’ve read the OP a couple times to try to figure it out. Sociology and biology are different subjects.

As for Nixon’s war on drugs, it was a success. The war on drugs was never a war on drugs, it was a war on minorities and counter culture types. The drug war ostracized and isolated them from society at large, gave police more surveillance powers and authority over them, enhanced the us vs them mentality against them, etc. This is what the drug war was designed to do. I feel OP misunderstands the actual goal of the war on drugs, it was never originally a war against addiction or low quality of life, the war on drugs was a resounding success at what it was actually designed to do which is give social and police powers to people who saw minorities and counter culture types as a threat to the system.

At this point it has become self perpetuating though, so groups like the DEA want prohibition since their finances and careers depend on prohibition of ‘something’.

16

From his lips to your ears:
Harper’s Magazine “Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs”

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Stranger

17

Yes, I agree with everything you say. A scientist who highlighted the extent to which life is cooperative, and co-existing, is Lynn Margulis, the wife of Carl Sagan. She made the idea famous that many cell organs are, in fact, originally smaller organisms that were incoorporated in larger organisms. In much the same way as animals and humans exist, for over half their body weight, of bacteria they live with. So no, I’m not making the beginners ( and ruthless bussiness people’s) mistake you point out to think that evolution is about struggle. Rather, I want to point out that the anthropic principle holds true for almost everything we humans see and notice. So, I want to point out that for us, things only exist once we’ve noticed them. We didn’t notice our own biome untill enough scientists convinced enough other scientists and marketing people and publishing people to tell the world about it. And even then, we didn’t know about it untill it became socially lucrative to aknowledge this fact.

18

I’m sorry I lost you when I made the jump from biology to sociology. Or to physics. The point I want to make is, that all of them have one major thing in common, and that is our own human biases in thinking about them.

19

Keeve, you highlight exactly the point I want to make. I postulate several ways in which a thing can exist. You describe one.

Think of the famous zen Koan: if a tree falls in a wood and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does that sound exist in the sense you mean, in the sense I mean? ( Glib answers about recording equipment only place the problem at a later point). Alan Watts, in his lectures, makes a convincing case that a sound is a thing that exists only if an eardrum and a brain are present; otherwise the falling tree just dislodges air. It dislodges air in all directions if it falls, would you say it makes sound in all directions? Or just blasts an airwave?

My point is that most things that matter to humans enough to have a concept for, exist in the same way as the sound ( not the airwave; the sound) of a falling tree exists; only when there are humans around to notice them.

What I postulate, perhaps, is the anthropic principle as applied to science theory?

20

I don’t agree with you here.

Physical entities and forces exist whether humans are there to observe or not. They are what bought the planets and all living entities into being the first place and so must have preceded them.

Humans aren’t special, pivotal or central to the universe , we are just specialised in one particular cognitive area that allows us to think that we are.

Yes, clearly and obviously. Sound is a pressure wave and is not dependent on a human ear.
Is that sound perceived by a human if there is no-one around to hear it? clearly and obviously no but that’s a different question.