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    Ettin in the Playground
     
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    Default The thermal limits of natural selection.

    In another thread I keep saying that I do believe in entropy.

    The main reason for this is that I believe that natural selection can probably be mathematically derived from the second law of thermodynamics and/or entropy.

    I am sure that there are plenty of people who don't believe in natural selection, and a good proportion of those who do who don't believe it is a derivative of entropy.
    Last edited by halfeye; 2022-05-22 at 01:03 PM.
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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    It's less that you do not believe in entropy and more that you do not seem to understand entropy and optics.

    If you think that natural selection can be derived from thermodynamics, show something more concrete. Otherwise there is not much to discuss.

    Also, it might just be a language detail, but entropy is not something to believe in - no concept in science is.
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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by Radar View Post
    It's less that you do not believe in entropy and more that you do not seem to understand entropy and optics.

    If you think that natural selection can be derived from thermodynamics, show something more concrete. Otherwise there is not much to discuss.

    Also, it might just be a language detail, but entropy is not something to believe in - no concept in science is.
    To "believe in" something has multiple different meanings. One of them is "believe that [something] is true/real." With that meaning, yes, someone can believe in or not believe in a scientific concept.
    Last edited by Fiery Diamond; 2022-06-03 at 02:31 PM.

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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
    The main reason for this is that I believe that natural selection can probably be mathematically derived from the second law of thermodynamics and/or entropy.
    How?

    You can have a belief in whatever you like, I suppose, but that doesn't have much to do with science unless the thing can be done.

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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    For a lot of these concepts, its also like saying 'I believe in the number 7'. Entropy is a metric that counts the number of states something takes. Entropy, itself, isn't an assertion about how reality is or isn't.

    You, e.g., could disbelieve that the ergodicity hypothesis (that all states are eventually equally likely to occur) applies to real systems. But believing/disbelieving in 'entropy' itself is a category error.

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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    I'm re-reading this and I am unable to make sense of it.
    As everyone else said, entropy isn't something you believe in - it's just what is, like a number or carbon. And regardless, it doesn't apply to natural selection unless you're talking about Laplace's Demon, which I'm pretty sure isn't what you're trying to talk about.
    There isn't much of an assertion being made here.
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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by Fiery Diamond View Post
    To "believe in" something has multiple different meanings. One of them is "believe that [something] is true/real." With that meaning, yes, someone can believe in or not believe in a scientific concept.
    While one might indeed, it is not really the way to go. Believing that something is true/real means that you make an assumption without having any proof one way or the other. So it goes against the very concept of science, where the whole point is to test the ideas and find out what is or is not true instead of relying on assumptions alone.
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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by Radar View Post
    While one might indeed, it is not really the way to go. Believing that something is true/real means that you make an assumption without having any proof one way or the other. So it goes against the very concept of science, where the whole point is to test the ideas and find out what is or is not true instead of relying on assumptions alone.
    Belief can, sadly, trump proof though. There is plenty of proof the Earth is round, yet there are people who believe it's not. Science may be rational, but humans are not.

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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by Radar View Post
    Believing that something is true/real means that you make an assumption without having any proof one way or the other.
    I guess this goes to show that people use words to mean different things. Freshman philosophy will tell you that "knowledge" is "justified true belief", so allows for belief that is actually justified with a proof. There is a wide space between "I believe that Cantor's diagonal argument is valid", based on a careful analysis of the argument, and "I believe in fairies", based on acceptance of folklore.

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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    That's true, though it also means that this argument is heavily rooted in semantics. It's probably better to let it fade instead of arguing in agreement.
    An explanation of why MitD being any larger than Huge is implausible.

    See my extended signature here! May contain wit, candor, and somewhere from 52 to 8127 walruses.

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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Natural selection can be interpreted mathematically, with reference to thermodynamics, as the Maximum Power Principle, however this is mostly of only theoretical utility with regard to highly simplified systems and models. Actual modern ecological and evolutionary analysis largely rejects such framing, especially the attempt to organize everything based off a single variable.
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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidSh View Post
    I guess this goes to show that people use words to mean different things. Freshman philosophy will tell you that "knowledge" is "justified true belief", so allows for belief that is actually justified with a proof. There is a wide space between "I believe that Cantor's diagonal argument is valid", based on a careful analysis of the argument, and "I believe in fairies", based on acceptance of folklore.
    That might be because in philosophy proving something is a bit more difficult and the concept of knowledge by necessity allows a fluid gradation of proof. In science the typical understanding of knowledge is that is something proven to work whether anyone believes it or not as the universe does not care how we feel about it.

    But those are indeed just semantic details.
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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Belief does have a formal usage in statistics via the Bayesian formalism, and in turn can mean something specific in a scientific context when it comes to things like hypothesis testing and the interpretation of particular evidence.

    But that still means that the thing it's attached to had to be a sufficiently precise claim such that it makes quantitative predictions of the relative probabilities of different possible experimental results compared to some other hypothesis.

    So e.g. I have no problem with the phrase 'I believe in the second law of thermodynamics because of this collection of evidence'. It's just weird to say 'I believe in entropy' in that same sense. I'd say the same with natural selection. Natural selection itself isn't a hypothesis, it's a term defining a process. A hypothesis would be something like 'natural selection is responsible for the physical features of all life on Earth' or 'natural selection is inevitable in any system containing replicators'
    Last edited by NichG; 2022-06-03 at 05:53 PM.

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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Philosophically, I feel that entropy can do anything it puts its mind to.
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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    A hypothesis would be something like 'natural selection is responsible for the physical features of all life on Earth' or 'natural selection is inevitable in any system containing replicators'
    I find the second of those more plausible by far. There can be all sorts of random accidents that lead to physical characteristics, they have to be selected, but there is a random factor in there.

    I first became aware of the scientific basis for entropy and natural selection at about the same time, and I was impressed by their apparent similarity. They are both sort of inevitable, recursive and fractal seeming. I don't have the facility with maths to prove that they come from the same base, but I think it is highly likely that they do.
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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
    I find the second of those more plausible by far. There can be all sorts of random accidents that lead to physical characteristics, they have to be selected, but there is a random factor in there.

    I first became aware of the scientific basis for entropy and natural selection at about the same time, and I was impressed by their apparent similarity. They are both sort of inevitable, recursive and fractal seeming. I don't have the facility with maths to prove that they come from the same base, but I think it is highly likely that they do.
    The Price Equation is the sort of posthoc inevitable account of natural selection. Basically, if you have a set of things with some attribute x, the total change in x from one time to the other can be written as the innate charge in x for each of those things, plus the correlation between x and the rate at which things are added or removed from the set.

    It's kind of tautological if used post-hoc, like saying that 3 can be written as 1+2. But you can propose predictive, hypothetical mechanisms for both the drift and selection terms (like 'birth rate is proportional to metabolic efficiency') and then the equation will let you convert those into predictions about how the frequency of that attribute will change in the population.

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    Default Re: The thermal limits of natural selection.

    Quote Originally Posted by Imbalance View Post
    Philosophically, I feel that entropy can do anything it puts its mind to.
    And yet, it always just goes with the flow without putting any work into whatever it does.
    Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
    I find the second of those more plausible by far. There can be all sorts of random accidents that lead to physical characteristics, they have to be selected, but there is a random factor in there.

    I first became aware of the scientific basis for entropy and natural selection at about the same time, and I was impressed by their apparent similarity. They are both sort of inevitable, recursive and fractal seeming. I don't have the facility with maths to prove that they come from the same base, but I think it is highly likely that they do.
    In a sense they have common base but mostly in the mathematical language describing them as in both cases it is statistics. This does not mean however, that there is any particular connection between entropy and natural selection. After all, statistics is a very general branch of mathematics and it can be used to model many completely disjoined phenomena.
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