In a trivial sense, almost everyone agrees that evolution is progressive in some ways. The average life form on Earth today is far bigger, more complex, more intelligent and more beautiful than the average life form 3.5 billion years ago, when life began.
However this does not prove that evolution favors more complex organisms because they’re superior, which is what is truly meant by evolutionary progress. It could just be that it takes time for complex life to evolve, and since life started with minimal complexity, it had nowhere to go but up.
Stephen Jay Gould uses the analogy of a drunkard’s walk. Gould’s anology is explained by Robert Wright:
A drunk is heading down a sidewalk that runs east-west. Skirting the sidewalk’s south side is a brick wall, and on the north side is a curb and a street. Will the drunk eventually veer off the curb, into the street? Probably. Does this mean he has a “northerly directional tendency”? No. He’s just as likely to veer south as north. But when he veers south the wall bounces him back to the north. He is taking “a random walk” that just seems to have a directional tendency.
If you get enough drunks and give them enough time, one of them may eventually get all the way to the other side of the street. That’s us: the lucky species that, through millions of years of random motion, happened to get to the far north, the land of great complexity. But we didn’t get there because north is an inherently valuable place to be. If it weren’t for the brick wall—that is, the fact that no species can have less than zero complexity—there would be just as many drunks south of the sidewalk as north of it, and the randomness of all their paths would be obvious. Gould writes, “The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity.”
The problem with this metaphor is how far North does the drunk need to get before the wall no longer explains his progression? If you found 100 drunks that were all 100 miles North of the wall and came back a month later and found those same drunks were now on average 200 miles North, then obviously something other than the wall is moving them North because once you get 100 miles North, the odds of randomly stumbling 100 miles South are like the odds of flipping a coin and getting 100 consecutive heads.
So Gould’s argument can plausibly explain why single cellular organisms evolved into multi-cellular organisms, but it can’t seem to explain why organisms that are already 100 miles North of the wall also show increasing complexity.
Paleontologist Dale Russell (1989) found that the encephalization quotient (ratio of brain weight to expected brain weight for body size) of mammals more than tripped in 65 million years of evolution. It seems extremely unlikely that this tripling can be explained by Gould’s “no where to go but North” metaphor because brain size can certainly decrease in size, and even vanish all together.
On the other hand, there might be a survivor bias in Russell’s dataset in that the descendants of those mammals that decreased their brain size are no longer considered mammals, leaving only bigger brained mammals in the sample.
What is needed is a study that compares the brain size of extinct animals with the brain size of their living descendants. If most of the latter are bigger brained than most of the former, then Gould’s metaphor is debunked, and evolution really is progressive.
Pumpkin Person 
What do people think about mutton chop facial hair. Its popular with some old men, usually upper class landed aristocrat types in the uk. It looks a bit funny. For some reason i think moustaches male someone seem reliable. I must have watched a show when i was youbg that had a mustached good guy i guess. Worst facial hair is the kind of wizard beard. It looks terrible.
I also think blacks cant really pull off beards. I mean some can. East asians always seem to have for thin beards if they grow them. So they usually go the goatee route.
i hope you’re joking.
any facial hair other than no facial hair or the full osama/wizard beard is UN-Cynical and therefore bad taste and gay.
i imagine that in the old days when there were no razor blades or scissors men didn’t have a choice.
but keeping some and removing the rest is ARTIFICIAL and therefore UN-Cynical.
all or nothing.
it is odd that human hair keeps growing forever. there’s no advantage in that. there’s only one dog breed with hair like that, the poodle.
if not groomed the poodle develops dreads.
What school does zizek fall into? Hes sounda postmodernist Its hard to tell. He slurs his speech a lot. I think he has some sort of dead facial muscle as to why he speaksssh like thissh.
You sound like you’re on speed.
You sound like an ILLEGAL immigrant.
“The problem with this metaphor is how far North does the drunk need to get before the wall no longer explains his progression? If you found 100 drunks that were all 100 miles North of the wall and came back a month later and found those same drunks were now on average 200 miles North, then obviously something other than the wall is moving them North because once you get 100 miles North, the odds of randomly stumbling 100 miles South are like the odds of flipping a coin and getting 100 consecutive heads.”
How does this refute Gould’s argument? If you’d have actually read the book, you’d see it doesn’t.
Dale Russell is refuted:
I would argue, as does Feduccia (44), that the mammalian/avian levels of activity claimed by Bakker for dinosaurs should be correlated with a great increase in motor and sensory control and this should be reflected in increased brain size. Such an increase is not indicated by most dinosaur endocasts. (Hopson, 1977: 443)
If mammals had arisen late and helped to drive dinosaurs to their doom, then we could legitimately propose a scenario of expected progress. But dinosaurs remained dominant and probably became extinct only as a quirky result of the most unpredictable of all events—a mass dying triggered by extraterrestrial impact. If dinosaurs had not died in this event, they would probably still dominate the large-bodied vertebrates, as they had for so long with such conspicuous success, and mammals would still be small creatures in the interstices of their world. This situation prevailed for one hundred million years, why not sixty million more? Since dinosaurs were not moving towards markedly larger brains, and since such a prospect may lay outside the capability of reptilian design (Jerison, 1973; Hopson, 1977), we must assume that consciousness would not have evolved on our planet if a cosmic catastrophe had not claimed the dinosaurs as victims. In an entirely literal sense, we owe our existence, as large reasoning mammals, to our lucky stars. (Gould, 1989: 318)
Why didn’t Rushton discuss any of Gould’s arguments at the end is his book? Surely he was aware of them. Hmm…
Give it up PP.
Nothing you quoted debunks Russell’s claim that mammal encephalization tripled in the last 65 million years.
What I quoted debunks Russell’s thought experiment.
See Deacon for the refutation on brain size.
What I quoted debunks Russell’s thought experiment.
Russell simply noted the trend line of increasing dinosaur encephalization and extrapolated to today. Nothing you quoted invalidates his conjecture, other than possibly the idea that reptilian body plans can’t support huge brains. However it’s likely the big brained descendants of dinosaurs would be non-reptiles, indeed they already are: crows evolved from dinosaurs and already as smart as apes, if not smarter.
See Deacon for the refutation on brain size.
Provide a direct quote explicitly refuting the tripling of mammal encephalization since 65 million years ago.
Um yea, Hopson does.
Read Deacon 1990, one of the first points in his paper on brain size.
Provide the direct quote or shut up
[redacted by pp, June 20, 2019]
as time goes on variance increases as…
given a life form of a certain complexity at a certain time and place it may be beneficial to this organism to become more complex or to become less complex.
a random walk with a wall will have a greater spread the longer the walk…duh.
imagine a “galton board” with a wall.
the more pegs the greater the spread.
each peg or nail corresponds to the evolutionary “decision” to become more or less complex.
if it’s 50/50 evolution is NOT progressive.
BUT the complexity of the most complex organism at any given time increases with time.
if evolution is “regressive”, it “prefers” simplification, can the complexity of the most complex organism still increase forever?
“If you found 100 drunks that were all 100 miles North of the wall and came back a month later and found those same drunks were now on average 200 miles North, then obviously something other than the wall is moving them”
If this process were random, after a month you’d expect to see as many drunks 200 miles away as back at the starting point. So in the case of evolution there’d be as many species that regressed from a fixed point back to the beginning in a given amount of time as species that advanced the same distance.
Are there any instances of complex multi-cell organisms reverting to more basic forms in the fossil record?
If this process were random, after a month you’d expect to see as many drunks 200 miles away as back at the starting point. So in the case of evolution there’d be as many species that regressed from a fixed point back to the beginning in a given amount of time as species that advanced the same distance.
Exactly!
Are there any instances of complex multi-cell organisms reverting to more basic forms in the fossil record?
There might be some but I suspect it’s extremely rare.
Not progressive doesn’t necessarily mean not random.
I can’t see how evolution is solely progressive. This could be a one off, but the T-Rex evolved into a chicken. The terror bird evolved (one of) into the red legged seriema, it’s a 3 inch bird which can’t do shit really. Evolution isn’s always about getting more advanced, it’s more to do with what a particular organism needs to survive, and have the most fitness.
Gould’s point in Full House was that organisms nearer to the right wall of complexity can become less complex.
Yeah, the passage sorta implies that, too. I was speaking generally.
The Law of Diminishing returns applies to many things in life. I’d assume evolution would be no different.
Most creatures that end up on isolated islands end up smaller and often lose capabilities over time.
Weren’t some of the biggest creatures on this planet alive during the Mesozoic era? I would argue that getting smaller is the evolution, you need less food, and everything works more efficiently.
I would think that Evolution kind follows a law of diminishing returns, there’s going to be an upper limit to everything, and there’s nowhere to go but down. So I think it’s too early to determine whether evolution is purely progressive.
Pumpkin, I have a question. I heard somewhere that if there are a billion or so kids from the same parent, you get someone with the exact same DNA as another. Wouldn’t that be the case with life itself? Once you get to a certain point, you create copies?
Well our genome has “only” about 3 billion base-pairs so if the population were sufficiently large, everyone would have a clone.
Wouldn’t that be counter to progressive then? Because at the end of the day, it’s not really progressing, it’s just following a diminishing returns cycle.
Avian brains, and by backward extrapolation dinosaur brains, never evolved the sort of radial glial developmental neuronal cells for developing layered brains the way mammals did. (They travel out from the neural tube past the previous layers to the next layer being grown. A difficult process that often goes wrong, even now. Not easy to evolve. Presumably did in mammals to help integrate sensory information as being mostly nocturnal.) The very few large brained dinosaurs are rarities that like dolphins for mammals have large brains that don’t seem to do much more than much smaller brains. (The cost of growing large brains for dolphins is relatively small as their diet is rich in the substances for it. I suspect the expense of running the dolphin brain metabolically is about the same as for a dog’s brain, given that seems to be about their intelligence level.) Dinosaurs for the most part have tiny, tiny brains, mostly used up in processing simple motor function. The point is that evolution leads to dominant patterns that because success breeds success, more creatures to more opportunities for evolution to fine tune those pre-existing patterns (dinosaurs), they become hard to displace in the absence of something like a massive extinction event. So in a sense evolution is locally progressive but globally it can dead end. (In the mathematics of evolution these are talked about as hills of local maxima.) Corvids and parrots are probably at the limit. My favorite example along these lines is the absence of placental mammals as having evolved in Australia, suggesting placentalism evolved (took fire from a mutation) only ~once~ after Australia splits off from the larger land mass it was a part of. Placental mammals are ~much~ smarter than the non-placentals. (Skip long discussion including bits about David Haig’s speculations of the effect placentalism as platform for parental genomic imprinting.. ) (New paragraph.) But the main point in the blog post seems to be around the idea of the inevitability of the evolution of intelligence. It is an argument that fits into the old debates around teleological reasoning, an old theological approach to using prophecies of the end times to reason out what must be happening now in order to lead up to those prophecies being fulfilled. It seems common for people to start with the anthro-centric intuition that general intelligence is so obviously advantageous it must be inevitable, and then reason backward as to why that must be so. I belabor this point because I think it’s why so many people seem blind as to what for me seems an obvious answer to the Fermi Paradox. Evolution of placental mammalian general intelligence to the levels of humans is nearly impossible. (New paragraph.) By the way, I read some of his earlier works, but his 2005 book is supposed to be really good. — Brain Evolution by Georg F. Striedter.
Australia had only a fraction of earth’s biodiversity when it split off so evolution will be slower there
“then obviously something other than the wall is moving them North”
If it’s so “obvious” that “something else is moving them”, what is it that’s “moving them”? Have you read McShea’s work or not?
If it’s so “obvious” that “something else is moving them”, what is it that’s “moving them”?
Natural selection TOWARDS greater intelligence, not simply natural selection AWAY from zero complexity, as Gould proposed.
“Natural selection” isn’t a mechanism.
I didn’t even use the word mechanism. Stop trying to confuse the issue with your semantic obsessions
It doesn’t matter if you didn’t.
this is just because evolution is continuous.
that is, organisms cannot vault in complexity.
that is, in order for a certain level of complexity to be achieved within a million years, or whatever geologic time unit,, a certain level must have already been reached.
the number of species needn’t increase.
the spread/range of the galton board is greater for 100 species (balls) and 100 nails than for 100 species and 50 nails.
time is itself a WALL for complexity.
capiche?
But then they had mass immigration of stegasauruses from Gondwana that lowered the average intelligence and they didn’t oppose it because they didn’t want to be racist. Slogans like “two brains are better than one” appeared. Opposition was denounced as Laurasiasupremacism.
It was widely believed that this was orchestrated in secret by the Matheronodons.
“Is evolution progressive?”
More correct title would be:
“Is evolution a eugenicist racist Nazi”
brains detect motion shapes and colors
brains detect what other brains will do.
greater social intelligence means a drastic increase in self-organization.
self-organization means cooperation to change the environment towards one’s advantage.
colors shapes and motions become tools in the organisms mental space.
mental experimentation takes place
self-awareness emerges
Santo is going to find this one hilarious.
The fascist strongman can’t even do manly push-ups. Look at him “go” hahaha
Off topic:
I just read how Google’s A. I confused guacamole with a cat. Maybe google should enable its NNs to detect ‘ specific” outlines of stuff too. Use similarities detection to hone in to the cat/guacamole category and use differences detection to identify if it’s a cat or guacamole. And differences can be detected by ‘specific’ stuff like specific outline of the things it wants to recognise.
Also motion detection. A lot of NNs still are primarily to detect static images if I am not mistaken. If NNs can be reworked or motion detection ANs could be added to the NNs, it will help a lot in identifying differences. Even in videos . Also it will help a lot for self driving technology too.
Those were not scare quotes. I am habituated to use british english. I used them for emphasis/to highlight those points.
Russell’s paper was one of the more mindblowing ones out there.
“What is needed is a study that compares the brain size of extinct animals with the brain size of their living descendants. If most of the latter are bigger brained than most of the former, then Gould’s metaphor is debunked, and evolution really is progressive.”
Very much so. I would be very surprised if that’s not the case. I see a general trend of animals becoming more neotenous looking over time, suggesting more efficient brains are increasingly compensating for fangs and claws.
That would fit Rushton’s theory in that recently emerged Mongoloids are more neotenous than Caucasoids who are more neotenous than early emerging Negroids.
People still buy in to evolution? So do you believe we share a common ancestor with the banana? Lol.
How tall are you, PP? I am interested in the correlation between height and intelligence.
That correlation comes about via a poor proxy for head size which is a less than perfect proxy for brain size which itself has at best a moderate correlation with intelligence. In other words, don’t waste your time going down that rabbit hole. If you are interested in inferring intelligence via physiological factors I would go directly to brain size if I where you and even then I would be extremely cautious.
The default circuit in the brain, myelination, brain structure/organization and mitochondrial DNA likely collectively play a far more important role when it comes to intelligence than brain size.
What you should be asking PP is what his cranial capacity is, his simple/complex reaction time, the size of his forehead, and how intelligent/energetic his mother is.
I think there is a general progression over large time scales but the shorter the time frame the greater the variance meaning that one is bound to run into regressive pockets of time, perhaps even for all species. However progressive is not the word that comes to mind when I think of evolution…more like adaptation. Due to the fact that life is uni-modal(ie only applies to the living, meaning that there is no anti-life that exists somewhere) this means that there is a threshold at which life ceases to exist and no longer gets tallied in the evolutionary “game”(similar to your game where no one goes to zero). This therefore results in the “illusion” that evolution is progressive seeing as a reduction in survivability results in the culling of that species or particular blood line and it no longer “counts”. The laws of probability therefore dictate that given enough time life will keep progressing and every now and then reach a new high(prob less than 5% of the time) before it gets back to the regular grind or variance.
Therefore barring any cataclysmic event life in general basically has the game rigged in its favor such that “the only way is up”. So in that sense I would definitely agree with Gould. Where it gets a little trickier is when evolution instils in us either the instinct or the cognitive ability to give evolution an extra progressive push. This tends to accelerate “progress” but this is only a matter of chance seeing as any instinct that would lead to regression or annihilation would eventually drop out of the gene pool in short order. Therefore, I would say that evolution is like a cog wheel with a backstop and as such progress is inevitable even though the processes that lead to it are random. In other words even the recent genetic predisposition(instinct, cognitive ability or whatever you want to call it) in advanced beings to accelerate evolution in a “progressive” direction is itself a random event that is now ensured continuity via the evolutionary backstop(barring any extinction level event).
So generally evolution is all about adaptation more than anything else. In my view progress is a byproduct due to the way the system operates. In theory given enough knowledge humanity should be in a position to accelerate evolution exponentially(not unlike the principle of the doubling of computing power, or Moore’s law). What I find fascinating is that life essentially runs counter to perhaps the most primal modality of the Universe that of increasing entropy. In essence life violates the second law of thermodynamics. Is this then the ultimate end of the universe, decrease in entropy through us?
pumpkinhead,
yes, any progress in evolution would have to be adaptability, but I use the word progress because evolution is often conceived as a ladder of progress and because more adaptable life forms are objectively superior (when it comes to survival) and subjectively superior (when judged by everyday people).
The problem is many scientists would dismiss the idea that organisms get more adaptable over evolutionary time, instead arguing that they merely become more adapted to specific environments. So instead of seeing evolution marching towards more and more adaptability, they see only a series of adaptive trade-offs (i.e. land animals were more adapted to land than their marine ancestors, but they are less adapted to the sea).
And even those who admit that life gets progressively more adaptable over time would perhaps just invoke Gould’s nowhere to go but up rule, thus dismissing any progress as random.
But I think there’s more to it than than. I think nature selects not just for local adaptations that are domain specific, but general adaptations like intelligence that work everywhere. I think brain size tripled in 4 million years of evolution, not because brain size had nowhere to go but up, but because bigger brains were adaptive in almost every environment and I think most organisms on earth are more adaptable than their ancestors 4 million years ago.
“yes, any progress in evolution would have to be adaptability, but I use the word progress because evolution is often conceived as a ladder of progress and because more adaptable life forms are objectively superior (when it comes to survival) and subjectively superior (when judged by everyday people)”
Yes, we are very much on the same page with regard to this. My only contention is that IMO that progress is far more subjective than people think and what’s more progress is not an in-built part of evolution, it is merely a by product of evolution given current circumstances. One, I suspect, could in theory devise ideal conditions for what a lot of people would subjectively and perhaps objectively consider regressive qualities to thrive but it just so turns out that those qualities are exactly what is required for that environment. Point being that in aggregate I agree that overall progress is inevitable but this has almost everything to do with the evolutionary “backstop”(just coined that term, not sure if it is at all used) or Gould’s bouncy wall, and very little to do with any semblance of progress being an in-built aspect of evolution.
Progress requires sentience in order for it to be envisioned(instead of regress, for example). I highly doubt that evolution had progress in mind from the get go. It has only emerged as sentient beings started becoming aware of their survival instincts and place in the world. So perhaps evolution has a more fundamental progressive bent through us but this is very recent on an evolutionary scale while that is not at all how we got here. In short the only reason evolution appears to be progressive is due to death and cellular degradation, without these facts of life evolution would probably randomly go in any and all directions.
“But I think there’s more to it than than. I think nature selects not just for local adaptations that are domain specific, but general adaptations like intelligence that work everywhere. I think brain size tripled in 4 million years of evolution, not because brain size had nowhere to go but up, but because bigger brains were adaptive in almost every environment and I think most organisms on earth are more adaptable than their ancestors 4 million years ago.”
Right, it is all about survival and to put it simply, bigger is almost always better, particularly when it comes to the brain. It therefore stands to reason that brain size will increase across the board for almost all species as it should increase the chances for survival.
I guess one can boil this argument down to a philosophical discussion of how one defines progress and what is it that makes progress a positive or desired outcome thereby giving it it’s current meaning as it is understood by most people. I think it is inescapable that progress is simply a matter of improved survivability, but what we may consider progress in our corner of the universe might be considered regressive in another corner of the universe. In other words progress is not a universal standard, it depends on the circumstances and our subjective judgement.
Yes, we are very much on the same page with regard to this. My only contention is that IMO that progress is far more subjective than people think and what’s more progress is not an in-built part of evolution, it is merely a by product of evolution given current circumstances.
I agree that evolution does not necessitate progress, and indeed we have examples of regressive evolution like Homo erectus (brain size 980 cc) evolving into Homo_floresiensis (320 cc). Even the brain size of our own species shrunk dramatically after the ice age, though I suspect that was just temporary malnutrition, not evolution. However I suspect regressive evolution is the exception, not the rule, not just on Earth, but on most planets where life has evolved, though I obviously can’t prove that.
Point being that in aggregate I agree that overall progress is inevitable but this has almost everything to do with the evolutionary “backstop”(just coined that term, not sure if it is at all used) or Gould’s bouncy wall, and very little to do with any semblance of progress being an in-built aspect of evolution.
I disagree that Gould’s bouncy wall explains almost all evolutionary progress because that hypothesis would predict that among species that are sufficiently distant from the wall to have room for regression, regression should occur 50% of the time. Do you think that if we looked at the 100 most encephalized species living 1 million years ago, at least 50% of their extant descendants would be less encephalized? I don’t think so, but no such study has ever been done so I could be wrong. Other have compared the complexity of ancestors vs descendants and found no statistically significant trend, but complexity is vaguely defined.
Progress requires sentience in order for it to be envisioned(instead of regress, for example). I highly doubt that evolution had progress in mind from the get go.
I agree 100%. And indeed one of the dangers of arguing that evolution is progressive is you get mistaken for a religious person arguing for intelligent design. I don’t in any way believe evolution has a purpose or a goal, however I suspect that billions of years of blind mindless trial and error is an incredibly potent self-correcting process, and might gradually lead to something very close to perfection (i.e. the human mind)
I guess one can boil this argument down to a philosophical discussion of how one defines progress and what is it that makes progress a positive or desired outcome thereby giving it it’s current meaning as it is understood by most people. I think it is inescapable that progress is simply a matter of improved survivability, but what we may consider progress in our corner of the universe might be considered regressive in another corner of the universe. In other words progress is not a universal standard, it depends on the circumstances and our subjective judgement.
I think if we could take species from 1 million years ago and have them compete with their extant descendants in an environment equally distant from both (say 0.5 million years ago) the descendants would out-compete the ancestors in most cases. Of course such an experiment is impossible, but it’s one objective way of thinking about progress.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7881617/Scientists-say-evolution-PREDICTABLE.html
Interesting news….must mean a lot of things in this Universe are patternized and would follow the same consequential behaviors as they already have.